Chinese supercomputer aids climate scientists

IF NOT for the deafening noise they made, one might have mistaken the nine mainframes positioned in a circle in east China's National Supercomputer Centre for employee lockers.

The three-metre-tall machines are actually part of a single working unit the Sunway-Bluelight Supercomputer, installed in the supercomputer center in east China's city of Jinan.

The cutting edge tool is being used by China's marine scientists to monitor ocean circulation. Dr Song Zhenya, a researcher from the First Institute of Oceanology (FIO) under the State Oceanic Administration said the Sunway can substantially boost China's ocean monitoring capabilities through the use of "vortex ocean simulation", a high-definition marine forecasting model defined by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"Its marvellous calculation abilities will allow us to unearth more clues in regards to what is happening in our planet's climate," said Song, citing the ocean as a primary indicator of the world's climate.

Aided by the Sunway, scientists have been able to increase the accuracy of their climate simulations, Song said.

Pan Jingshan, assistant director of the National Supercomputer Centre, said the Sunway allows scientists to simulate water movement more than 5,500 metres below the ocean's surface.

China finished building the Sunway-Bluelight Supercomputer last September, just one year after the debut of the Tianhe-1A, which was known as the world's fastest computer before being surpassed by Japan's K computer in June 2011.

The Sunway performs about one-thousand-trillion calculations per second, ranking it among the 20 fastest supercomputers in the world.

Steve Wallach, a consultant to the United States Department of Energy Advanced Scientific Computing program at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said the most impressive part of the computer is the fact that "most of the technology, especially the microprocessors, was homegrown".

"This is very different from the Tianjin system, which uses Intel and nVidia CPUs," Wallach said.

Liang Jun, deputy director of the National Center for Parallel Computer Engineering Research, said the centre's computer engineers optimised the Sunway's CPU structure in order to "better apply the unique core algorithm used in climate forecasting".

Pan said the supercomputer uses "dense packaging" technology to combine 1,024 16-core CPUs, equalling the computational capacity of a total of 200,000 servers.

The Sunway is about 74 per cent as fast as the Jaguar Supercomputer in the United States, which ranks third in the world, although the Sunway is less power-hungry, Pan added. The Sunway's power consumption is just one megawatt, much lower than the Jaguar's seven megawatts.

The supercomputer's temperature can be decreased by two to three degrees Celsius without a single cooling fan, thanks to a unique liquid cooling system, Pan said.

Supercomputers are a must for countries that wish to have a credible say regarding issues such as climate change and disaster relief, Pan said.Xinhua