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, Assistant Director of National Supercomputing Wuxi Center, 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.
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.
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.
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 isits 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.
With Sunway as the main computing power, Gan Lin’s team won the Gordon Bell Prizein 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.
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.
In 2017, ACM named Gan Lin’s 12-member team as the recipients of the 2017 ACM Gordon Bell Prize, for their research project, “18.9-Pflops Nonlinear Earthquake Simulation on Sunway TaihuLight: Enabling Depiction of 18-Hz and 8-Meter Scenarios.” Using the Sunway TaihuLight, which is ranked as the world’s fastest supercomputer, the team developed software that was able to efficiently process 18.9 Pflops of data and create 3D visualizations relating to a devastating earthquake that occurred in Tangshan, China, in 1976. This is the second time that the prize has been given to the Chinese research team.
With a Linpack mark of 93 Petaflops, the Sunway TaihuLight outperforms the former TOP500 champ, Tianhe-2, by a factor of three.In summary, Sunway TaihuLight was built with Chinese technology, is currently the world's fastest computer, and contributes significantly to research benefiting the Chinese people.
Nowadays, with the efforts of this group of young people, Sunway TaihuLight has completed hundreds of application projects and nearly 8 million mission tests. This supercomputer can complete the tsunami warning within ten minutes, complete the global climate simulation for the next 100 years in 30 days, and provide accurate predictions for the return of the spacecraft. Gan Lin has also won a variety of honors, many of which are "China's first" in the field of supercomputers.
(Source:ourjiangsu.com)
