back to article China looks set to pip Uncle Sam at the post in exascale computer race

China is to take a clear lead in the exascale superdupercomputer race - its Tianhe-3 system looks to be a whole year ahead of the US's best efforts. Aurora, Frontier and El Capitan, the three US exascale supercomputers, are set to be eclipsed by China's Tianhe-3 1 exaFLOPS system which is prototyping this year with delivery …

  1. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    Imagine licencing Windows Server 2016 for 10 million cores... o_O

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      You need to port it first

      The processor is homebrew - non-Intel. Risc architecture of some sort.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: You need to port it first

        It's a descendant of Alpha if I remember correctly.

        1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

          Re: You need to port it first

          It's a descendant of Alpha if I remember correctly.

          Apparently not:

          Report on the Sunway TaihuLight System

          Shenwei-64 Instruction Set (this is NOT related to the DEC Alpha instruction set)

          Although

          Very little on the detail design of SW1600 chip was make public but various comments in the web and some history of the 江南计算所SW微处理器 indicate that SW has it original from the DEC alpha chip 21164

          How is it even possible that no-one has wikileaked the instruction set?

      2. Lars Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: You need to port it first

        China has used Linux from the very start to produce their own processors.

      3. kcblo

        Re: You need to port it first

        From what I read, they are the home grown Mips chips consist of 260 cores. Compares with IBM's supercomputer, Summit is 2 to 3 (200-300 petaflops) times faster, yet consumes roughly half amount of electricity.

  2. Blockchain commentard

    Is anyone else thinking that it could be stress tested by generating Bitcoins?

  3. defiler

    Nnnnng!! Pet hate!

    30-40MW/hour

    You mean 30-40MWh/hour, or MW as the kids are calling them...

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      Re: Nnnnng!! Pet hate!

      No, that's actually the increasing energy consumption as it gets deeper into deep questions.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The race is on !

    Exascale computing vs Windows support for Long File Paths

    Which will come first ?!

  5. Rich 10

    I Exspecter a core Meltdown.

  6. Jay Lenovo

    Compute ourselves healthy

    At 30-40MWh/hour... Hopefully all this compute power can be used to figure out climate change.

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