Enter China: A prototype four-core Loongson 3 will be produced at commercial scale by STMicro starting this year.
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
The machine will use an unfashionable chip design.
It's official: China's next supercomputer, the petascale Dawning 6000, will be constructed exclusively with home-grown microprocessors. Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the Loongson (also known as "Godson") family of CPUs at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also confirms that the supercomputer will run Linux. This is a sharp departure from China's last supercomputer, the Dawning 5000a, which debuted at number 11 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers in 2008, and was built with AMD chips and ran Windows HPC Server.
The arrival of Dawning 6000 will be an important landmark for the Loongson processor family, which to date has been used only in inexpensive, low-power netbooks and nettop PCs. When the Dawning 5000a was initially announced, it too was meant to be built with Loongson processors, but the Dawning Information Industry Company, which built the computer, eventually went with AMD chips, citing a lack of support for Windows, and the ICT's failure to deliver a sufficiently powerful chip in time.
The Dawning 6000 will be completed by mid-2010 at the latest, says Hu, and could be up and running as early as the end of 2010. It is the second time that a representative from the ICT has promised a supercomputer built entirely using Loongson processors.
The development of Loongson 3 began in 2001 as a product of China's 10th five-year program. All of the chips in the Loongson family are based on the MIPS instruction set--originally developed in the 1980s but now out of favor in desktop and server computers, although still used in many embedded devices. Currently, the Top 500 list is dominated by x86 chips, with non-x86 CPUs powering less than 15 percent of the high-performance systems on the list.
"This is a very high-performance MIPS architecture where, when it's run in a cluster configuration, it becomes very powerful," says Art Swift, vice president of marketing at Sunnyvale, CA-based MIPS Technologies, which developed the MIPS architecture.
A paper published in 2009 proposes using Loongson 3 chips in clusters of up to 16 cores to accomplish extremely high performance. Tom Halfhill, analyst at Microprocessor Report, calculates that in this configuration, meeting the petaflop performance mark (one quadrillion operations per second) could require as few as 782 16-core chips.
Halfhill says the Loongson 3 is little different from the latest-generation chip, Loongson 2F, which is already available in consumer PCs. The main differences are that it includes hardware translation of x86 instructions (used in most of the microprocessors made by Intel and AMD), and it incorporates multiple cores--from four up to a proposed 16--each capable of processing commands independently. Conspicuously absent from the Loongson 3 is multithreading, which allows a single core to execute multiple instructions simultaneously. (Both Intel and Sun have already incorporated multithreading into some of their chips.)
Generations 2 and 3 of the Loongson use the same general-purpose core, but the Loongson 3 tethers more cores together. A quad-core Loongson 3 chip is currently in prototype, and a final, 64-nanometer version of the chip was "taped out" in late December, meaning the final description of the chip will soon be sent to the manufacturer, STMicroelectronics.
Verayo is harnessing unique manufacturing flaws to make RFID tags that are impossible to copy.
You say: "Using the erroneous Turing Machine-based paradigms of the last sixty years ..." I recall learning that, based on TM, parallelizing by a factor of N can improve performance by at most a factor of N. Are you saying that there are parallel architectures that break TM paradigm and so get around this limitation?
No. What I'm saying is that, if the Turing computing model (TCM) were the appropriate model for parallel processing, the industry would not be in the mess that it is currently in and you would not be reading this comment. Regardless of what has been claimed by the experts about universality, a Turing Machine models one thing and one thing only, a sequential computer.
The biggest problem with the TCM is that operation timing (other than the implicit sequentiality of execution) is not part of the model. What is needed is a computing model in which any two operations of a program can be unambiguously determined as being either sequential or parallel (simultaneous). This sort of deterministic processing is essential to reliability, security and ease of programming but is impossible to achieve with concurrent threads and therein lies the problem with the current approach to parallelism.
In sum, the computer industry must abandon threads altogether or resign itself to endure a lot of pain in the years ahead. The Loongson solves nothing. It's just more pain for the Chinese.
"This is a sharp departure from China's last supercomputer, the Dawning 5000a, which debuted at number 11 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers in 2008, and was built with AMD chips and ran Windows HPC Server."
WRONG!
As of November 2009, a Chinese system occupies the number 5 position on the TOP500 list. Tianhe-1, assembled by China’s National University of Defense Technology, attains a theoretical peak rate of 1.2 PFLOPS. It includes 2560 compute nodes, each with two quad-core Xeon processors for scalar workloads and two AMD Radeon 4870x2 GPUs for vector workloads.
Ok - which of you guys is Leonard and which one is Sheldon???
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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Mapou
357 Comments
Another Me-too Chinese Project
Interesting article but what a waste of good research talent! The hard reality is that any new processor that does not solve the parallel programming crisis is on a fast road to failure. No long march to victory in sight for the Loongson, sorry.
China should be trying to become a leader in this field, not just another me-too follower. There is an unprecedented opportunity to make a killing in the parallel processor industry in the years ahead. Intel may have cornered the market for now but they have an Achilles' heel: they are way too big and way too married to last century's flawed computing paradigms to change in time for the coming massively parallel computer revolution. Their x86 technology will be worthless when that happens. The trash bins of Silicon Valley will be filled with obsolete Intel chips.
Here's the problem. The computer industry is in a very serious crisis due to processor performance limitations and low programmer productivity. Going parallel is the right thing to do but the current multicore/multithreading approach to parallel computing is a disaster in the making. Using the erroneous Turing Machine-based paradigms of the last sixty years to solve this century's massive parallelism problem is pure folly. Intel knows this but they will never admit it because they've got too much invested in the old stuff. Too bad. They will lose the coming processor war. That's where China and Intel's competitors can excel if they play their cards right.
The truth is that the thread concept (on which the Loongson and Intel's processors are based) is the cause of the crisis, not the solution. There is an infinitely better way to build and program computers that does not involve threads at all. Sooner or later, an unknown startup will pop out of nowhere and blow everybody out of the water.
My advice to China, Intel, AMD and the other big dogs is this: first invest your resources into solving the parallel programming crisis. Only then will you know enough to properly tackle the embedded systems, supercomputing and cloud computing markets. Otherwise be prepared to lose a boatload of dough. When that happens, there shall be much weeping and gnashing of teeth but I'll be eating popcorn with a smirk on my face and saying "I told you so".
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis:
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-to-solve-parallel-programming.html
Reply
sndream
13 Comments
Re: Another Me-too Chinese Project
Intel did tried to abandon the x84 architecture until it blow up in its face; Remember Itanium?
Developing a whole new computer architecture require huge amount of resources and talent. I highly doubt ICT have the budget or staff to accomplish it. Face it, scientific program always get the short end of the stick, it's the same everywhere in the world.
Reply
Mapou
357 Comments
Re: Another Me-too Chinese Project
The Itanium proves my point. Although it has some nice features (e.g., independent instruction execution), it failed because it does not solve the parallel programming crisis. Even Intel, who is sitting on a mountain of cash, can stumble miserably in this area. Other notable processor failures are IBM's Cell processor, Intel's own Larrabee and Sun's Rock. Next in line for total destruction: AMD's Fusion.
It would be funny if it weren't so sad. The writing is on the wall.
Reply
askmahesh
6 Comments
Re: Another Me-too Chinese Project
I don't think it's a necessity to develop a new processor. It's not a scientific achievement, it's a political achievement. US have export restrictions on exporting supercomputers. Even Japan was refused a supercomputer for environmental research.
Japan went around the export restrictions by developing PS3 the blade supercomputer processor. China is doing same thing with a brand new processor. If you are wondering you can buy a PS3 supercomputer running Yellow dog Linux
One more observation is there is no company that have 16 cores processors commercially available other than IBM. So China is on right path.
One more thing to note is Intel is slipping with 64 bit race, and so as Microsoft (I still don't believe that Microsoft refused to develop 64 bit database drivers for own products). There is no big company who is producing 128 bit processors on larger scale. IBM does it but only for small server market.
GP
Reply
rwong
1 Comment
Re: Another Me-too Chinese Project
The paradigm you're attacking is called von Neumann, not Turing. We already have FPGA, and it's doing great in some areas, but it's a far way toward general purpose computing.
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