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China Focus: China seeks homegrown expertise as U.S. bans supercomputer chip sales

Xinhua, April 20, 2015 Adjust font size:

Chinese supercomputer builders have downplayed a U.S. government ban on selling Intel processors to China and said the ban may instead boost homegrown expertise.

Lu Yutong, chief designer of Tianhe-2, currently the world's most powerful supercomputer system, said the system will "definitely achieve its upgrade goal" despite the ban.

"Supercomputer upgrades are not solely decided by CPUs, though the ban will have some negative impact," said Lu.

Chinese engineers had planned to upgrade Tianhe-2's processing power from its current 55 petaflops per second (55,000 trillion calculations per second) to more than 100 petaflops in 2015.

The Tianhe-2 system is the world's largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators, both of which were banned for sale to four Chinese organizations including the National University of Defense Technology by the U.S. Department of Commerce in early April.

The upgrade was expected to continue to use Intel Xeon CPUs, but now it seems that Chinese engineers will have to find another way.

"We already have a technical solution for the upgrade and we will reveal it when the time is right," said Lu, adding that China's supercomputer developers will meet any challenges.

Zhang Yunquan from the Institute of Computing Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the ban may encourage China to make better use of homegrown technology. "From a long-term perspective, it is good for the development of Chinese supercomputing."

In 2012, China launched the Sunway Bluelight, a supercomputer that uses processors designed and built in China. It was ranked No. 14 on the Top 500 list that year.

China also has the FT-1500 CPU, which was used in Tianhe-2 but only has processing prowess equal to Intel CPUs from back in the Tianhe-1 era.

"Independent acquisition of key technology is a national strategy," said Lu, adding the U.S. ban won't change the goal.

Fundamental change requires breakthroughs in more than just a few products. Chen Jian, chief executive officer of Beijing Paratera Tech Co. Ltd., said Intel not only has the best chips, but also the best engineers.

Lu also rejected the U.S. allegation that Tianhe-2 was used to conduct nuclear explosions. He said the system has been used for seismic simulation and in research on HIV/AIDS treatment. Endi