China has quietly launched the Tianhe-3 supercomputer, which is believed to be the most powerful machine in existence today.
The machine, built for the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, is shrouded in secrecy (as you would expect from a supercomputer developed and built in China), which has led to much speculation.
The Tianhe-3, also known as “Xingyi”, is believed to be a major leap forward in supercomputer technology and may surpass the capabilities of the upcoming “El Capitan” supercomputer being developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. .
Tianhe-3’s processor virtually deconstructed
In November 2023, The NextPlatform has made an analysis of the Top500 rankings for supercomputers which suggested that Tianhe-3 could deliver a peak performance of 2.05 exaflops and a sustained performance of 1.57 exaflops on High Performance LINPACK. This, the site said, would make it the “most powerful machine ever assembled on Earth.”
The Tianhe-3 is the latest in a series of supercomputers built by the National University of Defense Technology in China. Its predecessors, the Tianhe-1 and Tianhe-2, also had a significant impact on the supercomputing world, with the Tianhe-2 still ranking among the top 30 supercomputers even after several years of use.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the Tianhe-3 is its processor. A recent case study on programming the Matrix-3000 (MT-3000) accelerators, submitted to arXiv, provided some insight into the machine’s architecture. Elaborating on this, TheNextPlatform concluded that the Tianhe-3 uses a hybrid device with CPU and accelerator computing, as well as three different types of memory, two of which are located in the compute complex.
The website said: “It looks (more) like the AMD “Antares” MI300A CPU-GPU hybrid heading to El Capitan than the discrete CPU-GPU systems we see pushed to the flop in AI and HPC systems today. The MT-3000 is its own animal, and one might assume it uses a chiplet packaging architecture, since Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), the native Chinese foundry, probably couldn’t cram enough transistors into a 14-nanometer process to make a monolithic process. die. Then again, maybe this is a 10 nanometer device or even a 7 nanometer device. If NUDT doesn’t care about costs, the returns could be terrible, as long as SMIC can find tens of thousands of good MT-3000 parts to make the system.”
The Tianhe-3 supercomputer supports various application scenarios, including high-performance computing, AI training for large models and big data analytics. It is expected to expand the multi-field application service capabilities of the National Supercomputing Guangzhou Center, which provides services to Guangzhou city and Guangdong province.