Race to build the world’s first exacomputer – and why it matters
China is engaged in a global race that will, in some ways, redefine the meaning of “superpower”. This time the discourse has shifted from nuclear weapons to computational power as nations battle to become the first to build an exacomputer – a machine capable of a million trillion calculations a second.
Such powerful systems can be used for numerous applications, such as modelling climate and weather
systems, supporting life sciences, advanced manufacturing, cold fusion, and, of course, national defence.
China is already on a par with the US in terms of how many of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers it has – 167 and 165, respectively. The first exascale system will be more than 10 times faster than the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight which China launched last year. In this digital arms race, with China pitched against US, Japan and Europe, Beijing is driving its efforts through the National Computer Center, which hopes to have a prototype by the end of this year and a fully operational model online in 2020. This would beat the US Department of Energy’s forecast deadline by three years.
The ubiquitous nature of digital technology and the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning will require increasingly powerful computers at a national level. The international contest to build the first exascale system will result in numerous duels within each country’s scientific and technological communities.
Those heavily invested in the use of legacy technology will attempt to close off the threat from more radical thinkers who say we need a complete paradigm shift in the way we think about computer architecture.
Calling the contest an “arms race” is no exaggeration either. Processing power will become an increasingly sensitive geopolitical issue as the ability to process information and cybernetically outthink other nation states will create a distinct advantage. Let’s not forget that while Apple’s claim in 1999 that the Clinton administration classified its G4 desktop machine, dubbed the “personal supercomputer”, as a weapon was little more than clever marketing, the US government did ban the export of Intel chips to China for the development of the Sunway TaihuLight system.
Using Chinese home-grown technology instead, the Sunway TaihuLight runs five times faster than the fastest US supercomputer, uses one third of the energy of the second fastest supercomputer in the world (also Chinese) and last year a team from China won the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize using Sunway TaihuLight for calculating atmospheric dynamics. Consequently, Chinese supercomputers have become a flagship for Chinese technologies that can be grown and controlled in terms of production, cost, and ecosystem.
Watching this race from the technological sidelines in Thailand will be interesting to say the least. I have written about how China is developing its own internet and mobile telephony system to challenge the West. Now it looks set to change the face of computing as we know it.
