Powered by 8,704 Chinese-developed ShenWei SW-3 1600 processors, China recently announced its new one petaflop supercomputer, the Sunway BlueLight MPP, which fits right into the world's top-20 fastest supercomputers.
The ShenWei processors are developed by Jiāngnán Computing Research Lab. with a MIPS-compatible instruction-set and a 64-bit, 16-core RISC architecture, clocked at 1.1GHz. Each chip peaks at around 140.8 GFLOPS. A comparable RISC-based architecture would perhaps be the PowerPC-based CELL CPU found in the PlayStation 3, which is capable of producing 230.4 GFLOPS. These figures are typically higher than what you would expect to find on an x86 CPU, as requirements for better general purpose functionality and the availability of graphics cards to offload to has led to a different performance balance being struck.
The Sunway BlueLight MPP itself was developed by the People's Republic of China. The machine is a water-cooled nine-rack system with processors arranged into 43 super-nodes, with each node containing a further 256 compute-nodes with a total of 150TB RAM and 2PB of external storage. Performance peaks at just over 1.07 petaflops with a sustainable performance of 765.9 teraflops. The system consumes a gigantic 1.074MW of power, giving each processor and its associated systems an effective 123W footprint.
This marks the first supercomputer ever built by China without the aid of non-Chinese firms NVIDIA, Intel and AMD. Perhaps Jiāngnán would next like to try its luck in the worldwide markets?
