Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opens the regular staff meetings before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 Shenzhen conference, it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business.

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is world’s fastest supercomputer, at 33 PFLOPS demonstrated and 55 PFLOPS theoretical performance.

Remember the Tianhe-2 machine at Guangzhou Supercomputer Center, the current World’s number one according to Top 500 Supercomputer list? Unlike some other China supercomputers – Tianhe-2 is fully Intel based machine,  the world’s largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators.

Even after Intel ‘opened the kimono’ and gave a nearly 70%  discount on its processors and accelerators, it has given Intel, and therefore US technology sector a major foothold in China and Asian region as such. Over the course of past two years, we were involved in a lot of discussions with Intel staff who were not privy to see the financial impact of the deal — and even argued our undoubtedly solid information. We’re not here to report how things should be, or are in marketing and investor presentations to its numerous staff, but how things really are.

During 2015, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer was supposed to be doubled in its size, up to 110 PFLOPs peak, again using the very same Intel processors and accelerators. Since now these are mature products with lower real manufacturing cost for Intel, they could finally make some real money.

Well, it was not to be: our tweety bird from the window chirped to us that Uncle Sam has put this supercomputer centre, together with National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, the system’s creators, and Tianjin centre, among others, on so a so-called “Denial List”, which prevents any high technology from the USA to be sold to these sites. Our sources used even harsher words.

Knowing that these several sites alone are expected to order some 250+ PFLOPS of compute in the next few years (around 500,000 top-end Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 processors, or  approximately $1 billion high margin list price) and they were THE Intel friendly ones, this is quite a loss to Intel, thanks to Uncle Sam.

But, what’s worse strategic loss in time is that, based on this decision as an excuse, indigenous China high end processor architectures can now push the government to gradually remove any dependence on US. This means just one thing: an AMD or Intel x86 processor technology is increasingly becoming errata non grata. Should the Chinese government react in force, it will give the Chinese vendors the blank check support to go all the way a developing their Alpha, POWER and MIPS processors for both the government and the mainstream commercial use.

You may think they are not up to the mark, but remember how fast British ARM architecture became the dominant processing architecture in the world. And this group doesn’t need to worry about the antiquated x86 ISA, worry about satisfying the dumbed down shareholder masses, or overpaying their marketing and sales staff, as well as the fat check, golden parachute-protected CxOs.

They have taken the best that the USA has developed (some of key Alpha, GPGPU and MIPS architects left US over the course of past four years, a lot of them due to non-renewed visas) and discarded due to corporate shenanigans, and the continued developing it much farther than anyone expected both on hardware and software side.

Five years ago, ShenWei showed a CPU that performed faster than the fastest GPUs of the time. Now, fifth generation is approaching, slotting between Tesla and FirePro GPGPUs and next-gen Xeon Phi accelerators. However, this is not an accelerator or a GPGPU – this is a CPU.

So, thanks to Uncle Sam, China might not have a 110 PFLOPS Intel based supercomputer but it definitely will launch a 100 PFLOPS system based on upcoming 64-core, TFLOPS-class ShenWei Alpha, with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket then even the next generation Xeon Phi or Volta/Pascal-based Teslas.  Next, of course 100 PFLOPS Chinese POWER8 or 9 — (thank you IBM) and then possibly even Loongson MIPS – -it may come back into the high end field with renewed government support because of this Uncle Sam move. All are clean, elegant, scalable high end RISC architectures.

So who are the winners and losers from this?

NUDT and Tianhe may be the losers for now, but only short term. They will simply speed up their HPC ARM plan.

Intel comes out the big loser from this and a lot: who will want to do a phased deployment large x86 machine in China now, and worry about future phases? Then comes Uncle Sam himself: they lost even that little bit of influence on the high end China HPC. How is that for “cutting your nose to spite your face?”.

VR WORLD’s  Analysis: US government moves accelerate the Chinese CPU roadmap while curtailing juiciest sales for Intel and other US vendors.

The post Uncle Sam Shocks Intel With a Ban on Xeon Supercomputers in China appeared first on VR World.

Today, the Department of Energy has announced that is has granted $425 million to build two new supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories as part of a broader CORAL initiative which is a collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore. $325 million of that will be spent on the actual supercomputer building while an additional $100 million will be used for the FastForward2 program, which is designed to encourage and enable hardware vendors to increase performance and efficiency for the next generation.

The first supercomputer, to be known as Summit, will be installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and will replace the currently existing ‘Titan’ supercomputer which is capable of a peak performance of 27 petaflops. Summit will be capable of delivering between 150 and 300 peak petaflops and will be used for ‘open science’. The Sierra supercomputer, designed to replace the existing Sequoia will be used for nuclear security simulations and will be capable of speeds in excess of 100 petaflops as well. Both systems will be faster than the world’s fastest supercomputer right now, Tianhe-2 in China, which currently clocks in at 55 petaflops of peak performance. Argonne’s hardware win is yet to be announced, but will be unveiled at a later date.

In order to achieve this level of performance, the laboratories participating in the CORAL initiative are harnessing the power of IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) Power 9 architecture CPUs and Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) yet-t0-be-announced Volta GPUs. This means that since this machine is expected to come online in 2017, that we can very likely expect to see Volta GPUs in 2017. The project will use Mellanox’s interconnect technologies to connect the systems together, but in order to connect the GPU to the CPU, they will be using Nvidia’s own NVLink GPU interconnect. NVLink is Nvidia’s own proprietary interconnect specifically designed to increase the communication speed between GPUs and Nvidia is working with IBM to get this interconnect embedded directly into the IBM Power CPUs that will be powering these different supercomputer designs. Additionally, the Summit supercomputer will also be using IBM’s own IBM Elastic Storage using GPFS technology and will store 120 petabytes of data.

The system as a whole, Summit, will only use 10% more power than Titan but will deliver approximately 5-10 the performance of Titan, illustrating where supercomputer designs are headed and how the Department of Energy is really trying to drive high performance increases while also promoting energy efficiency. The expected performance for Summit has already been stated to be between 150 and 300 petaflops, however, this is thanks to over 3400 compute nodes, each delivering 40 teraflops of performance alone. Each node will consist of IBM Power 9 CPU(s) and Nvidia Volta GPU(s), unfortunately we do not know if each node will be a dual processor node or how many GPUs will fit into each node, but the expectation would be a dual processor node with at least 2 GPUs per node.

a

This hardware win for IBM and Nvidia is a huge one because it illustrates that the Open Power partnership between the two companies is working and that it can enable IBM to ship more CPUs. This is a very big deal for IBM and Nvidia because this is the first supercomputer in the US in a long time that will be built without either Intel or AMD CPUs. It also means that Nvidia will finally make use of NVLink, which they announced will be coming out with the Pascal GPU, the predecessor to Volta. Nvidia has already said we can expect to see Pascal in 2016, which means the transition from Pascal to Volta will be a fairly quick one.

The Department of Energy has stated that the whole purpose of these new supercomputer designs is to enable exascale computing. Both Coral and FastForward2 are supposed to enable hardware manufacturers to help their customers build efficient and powerful suptercomputers capable of over 1 exaflop (or 1000 petaflops). And if they can get the Summit supercomputer to 300 petaflops, that’s going to be a huge step forward to achieving exascale computing and an exaflop supercomputer.

The post IBM and Nvidia to Build 100 Petaflop+ Supercomputers appeared first on VR World.