Sunway TaihuLight is a supercomputer independently researched and developed by China. A group of young scientists have struggled through their own efforts to realize the dream of China's supercomputer for 30 years. Gan Lin is one of them. He has led his team to win the world's highest award twice in the field of supercomputer.
Sunway TaihuLight does the number crunching at the National Supercomputing Center in the city of Wuxi, near Shanghai. At Wuxi Supercomputing Center, Gan Lin had just returned from a business trip to Beijing. He told reporters that his team has recently completed phased research on the new application they had developed.
Gan Lin, Assistant Director of National Supercomputing Wuxi Center
These two figures are simulations of rainfall and temperature which are very helpful for the prediction of disasters.
Whether disaster prediction, industrial design or equipment manufacturing, these complex computing problems can be solved only with the help of Sunway TaihuLight which has 40,960 chips but also a set of super application software.
Shouldering the mission of creating exclusive application software for domestic supercomputers, in 2015, Gan Lin, who was a Ph.D. student at Tsinghua University, came to the Taihu Lake alongside with a group of young technicians averaging 25 years old.
Yang Guangwen, Director of National Supercomputing Wuxi Center
国家超级计算无锡中心主任 杨广文 3A5A9774
Gan Lin was the first group of employees to settle in. It was very difficult at that time. The building was not built yet. There was no air conditioning inside. Gan Lin calmed down to do research step by step.
Gan Lin’s daily routine was occupied by writing code, programming, and testing, dealing with boring characters day after day. Supercomputer research programs require millions of lines of code, and sometimes it takes days or even weeks to pinpoint and eliminate a small mistake.
Gan Lin, Assistant Director of National Supercomputing Wuxi Center
国家超级计算无锡中心主任助理 甘霖
At around 8:00 pm, when looking at the building of our research building from the outside, you would see a unique view. The entire building is only lit up in the middle two floors. This is the R&D center of our super-computing center.
The efforts from hundreds of days and nights have not been disappointing. In June 2016, Sunway TaihuLight made its debut at the World Supercomputing Conference, and won the championship with its computing power. Sunway TaihuLight's peak performance can reach a mind-blowing 125,000 teraflops, meaning it's 125,000 times more powerful than the best personal computer available at stores.
However, Gan Lin was well aware that for high-performance computers, the speed of light is not enough, and the key is its ability to solve problems. The goal is to win the Nobel Prize in the field of super-computing the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, a global award mainly for parallel computing achievements. The ACM Gordon Bell Prize tracks the progress of parallel computing and rewards innovation in applying high performance computing to challenges in science, engineering, and large- scale data analytics.
Aiming at this goal, he led the team to overcome a series of problems in mathematics, atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, atmospheric biology and other interdisciplinary subjects. Gan Lin went around and humbly consulted many experts and scholars, while repeatedly polished each argument.
Liu Zhao, Gan Lin’s colleague甘霖的同事 刘钊
He wrote and revised the entire article for entry into the Gordon Bell Prize from beginning to end and drew every figure on his own.
With Sunway as the main computing power, Gan Lin’s team won the Gordon Bell Prize in 2016 at the World Supercomputer Annual Conference held in Salt Lake City, USA for designing a software system that calculates the flow of Earth's atmosphere. The prize had never previously been awarded to a group outside the US or Japan.
Gan Lin, Assistant Director of National Supercomputing Wuxi Center
国家超级计算无锡中心主任助理 甘霖
It was the first time that a Chinese team stood on the podium of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize. I was very excited and very glorious. I used the world's highest award to prove that our supercomputer is of excellent performance.
