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China's updated supercomputer list shows minimal gains while rumors of hidden exascale systems persist

China's supercomputer capabilities remain shrouded in mystery as Top 100 list shows no new systems (Image source: Dall-E 3)
China's supercomputer capabilities remain shrouded in mystery as Top 100 list shows no new systems (Image source: Dall-E 3)
China's updated Top 100 supercomputer list reveals modest performance gains, yet experts suggest the published rankings may not tell the complete story. Reports indicate several undisclosed exascale systems may exist, including the rumored Tianhe-3 with its Matrix-3000 architecture.

The Chinese Society of Computer Science has dropped its yearly list of the Top 100 supercomputers. Still, this time, there's more mystery than ever about the country's real capabilities in high-performance computing. The 2024 ranking is pretty much a mirror of last year's, except for some minor performance bumps that nudge the total computing power from 1.398 up to about 1.406 ExaFLOPS.

The first spot is taken by a system that was rolled out in 2023. It packs 15,974,400 CPU cores and scores 487.94 PFLOPS on the Linpack test. While it does outdo Japan's Fugaku supercomputer (442 FP64 PetaFLOPS), it still doesn't stack up to American heavyweights like El Capitan (1.742 ExaFLOPS), Frontier (1.353 ExaFLOPS) and Aurora (1.012 ExaFLOPS).

The second and third systems debuted in 2022, delivering 208.26 PFLOPS and 125.04 PFLOPS, respectively. Chinese authorities' tight-lipped disclosure of the main details of these top systems has led to much guessing about their hardware, with some folks thinking they run standard CPUs and GPUs sourced through alternative means.

Meanwhile, Jack Dongarra—who co-founded Top500.org—previously said that China actually has at least three exascale machines that haven't been officially reported. These unlisted systems supposedly deliver between 1.3 and 1.7 ExaFLOPS with hardware designed in China, and there's talk of a 2 ExaFLOPS beast running on Hygon x86 processors.

The Tianhe-3 supercomputer—often called "Xingyi"—might be China's most capable supercomputer. It's rumored to have a 2.05 exaflops peak and 1.57 exaflops sustained on Linpack. It's powered by the Matrix-3000 (MT-3000) chip, a mixed design that merges general-purpose computing with specialized acceleration.

The MT-3000 itself packs 16 CPU cores, 96 control cores, and 1,536 accelerator cores, delivering 11.6 teraflops of double-precision power at 1.2 GHz while chugging along at 45.4 gigaflops per watt. This layout shifts away from the usual separate CPU-GPU setups, like AMD's MI300A CPU-GPU hybrid approach.

Source(s)

HPC100 (in Chinese) & NextPlatform (in English) & TomsHardware (in English)

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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > News > News Archive > Newsarchive 2024 12 > China's updated supercomputer list shows minimal gains while rumors of hidden exascale systems persist
Nathan Ali, 2024-12-28 (Update: 2024-12-28)