China has quietly launched the Tianhe-3 supercomputer, believed to be the most powerful machine currently in existence.
The machine, built for the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, has been shrouded in secrecy (as would be expected from a supercomputer developed and built in China), leading to much speculation.
Tianhe-3, also known as “Xingyi,” is believed to be a major breakthrough in supercomputing technology, potentially surpassing the capabilities of the upcoming “El Capitan” supercomputer developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. .
Virtually deconstructing the Tianhe-3 processor
In November 2023, TheNextPlatform conducted an analysis of Top500 supercomputer rankings that suggested the Tianhe-3 could have a peak performance of 2.05 exaflops and a sustained performance of 1.57 exaflops on high-performance LINPACK. This, according to the site, would make it “the most powerful machine ever assembled on Earth.”
The Tianhe-3 is the latest in a series of supercomputers built by China's National University of Defense Technology. Its predecessors, Tianhe-1 and Tianhe-2, also had a significant impact on the world of supercomputing, and Tianhe-2 is still among the top 30 supercomputers even after several years of operation.
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 insights into the machine's architecture. Digging deeper into this, TheNextPlatform concluded that the Tianhe-3 uses a hybrid device with a CPU and a computing accelerator, as well as three different types of memory, two of which are located in the computing complex.
The site said: “It is [more] more akin to the AMD “Antares” MI300A CPU-GPU hybrid that will be coming to El Capitan than the discrete CPU-GPU systems we see failing in AI and HPC systems these days. The MT-3000 is an animal itself, and one might assume it uses a chiplet packaging architecture given that Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), the indigenous Chinese foundry, probably couldn't cram enough transistors into a 14-nanometer process. to make a monolithic. die. But then again, maybe it's a 10-nanometer or even a 7-nanometer device. If NUDT doesn't care about cost, then performance can be terrible as long as SMIC can find tens of thousands of good MT-3000 parts to make the system.”
The Tianhe-3 supercomputer will support various application scenarios, including high-performance computing, large AI model training, and big data analysis. It is expected to boost the multi-field application services capabilities of the Guangzhou National Supercomputing Center, which serves Guangzhou City and Guangdong Province.
