Interview: China becomes "serious challenger" on global supercomputing stage: Top500 co-author

In the world of high performance computing (HPC), China has made "huge progress" and is now already a "serious challenger" to the United States, but is still far from a supercomputing power, a co-author of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers told Xinhua.

According to the latest rankings released this week at Salt Lake City, China's Sunway TaihuLight has once again been named the world's fastest supercomputer, the eighth time in a row that a Chinese-made machine has taken the semiannual TOP500 crown. The U.S. hosts the No. 3 system, called Titan, which lags far behind Taihulight and another Chinese system called Tianhe-2 in terms of calculation performance.

China also tied with the United States in the total number of supercomputers, with 171 systems apiece. China overtook the U.S. in this category in the previous list in June. That marked the first time in the list's history that the U.S. lost its title as the largest user of HPC systems.

In an interview with Xinhua, Horst Simon, deputy director of the U.S. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who compiles the 23-year-old Top500 list with three colleagues from the U.S. and Germany, said that the story of China's HPC development is not about supercomputer alone, it's about China's overall semiconductor industry infrastructure.

Simon, a highly respected expert in computer science and applied mathematics, mentioned of China's huge negative trade deficit in semiconductors, which he believed could put China's further HPC development at high risk.

"China imports a lot of semiconductors. If you look at today, semiconductor is everywhere, in any type of industrial products," he said. "So if China has ambitions to grow all the manufacturing of high-end goods, China obviously needs to invest much in semiconductors to have a bigger domestic production of semiconductors. I think that is a big issue. Supercomputing is just one piece of an overall strategy."

Highlighting the importance of supercomputers for scientific research, economic competitiveness and national security, Simon said that China has poured a lot of money into this technology since 2001, the year the country had zero systems in the Top500 list.

While this heavy investment pushed China's HPC industry to a "very, very much competitive stage," the country maybe still has a long way to go if it intends to become a supercomputing power, he noted.

"Supercomputing is a whole ecosystem, it consists of hardware, software, applications, the education, infrastructure, (efforts) to build next generation of scientists, and also I think a certain readiness in universities, research institutes, companies to engage in this," said Simon.

"It's very difficult to do these many different things at one time ... so I think it will take a bit longer, and in that sense, China still has a number of things to accomplish."

Of these different things, China's progress in HPC applications impressed the renowned U.S. expert deeply, who recalled a lack of applications for China's Tianhe-1A in 2010 when the machine became the first Chinese system to take over the top spot of the Top500 list.

"When the Taihulight system was announced (this June), there were several application presentations and these are very good application presentations, they (Chinese) told me that a lot of Chinese scientists have now learned much faster how to use in the architecture," Simon said.

"So I think things have significantly progressed, and there may be still some other things missing, but it's clear, given that the hardware is there, the applications are there, and the infrastructure is there and getting a lot of support, China has made huge progress towards using supercomputers," he said.

It's also worth mentioning that China has four companies among the top 10 vendors of the list: Lenovo, Sugon, Inspur and Huawei. These companies sold 173 systems in total, accounting for one third of the list. In June 2015, there were only 10 such systems from Chinese vendors.

"I think the interesting thing to see will be in the next couple of years how these companies not just sell in the domestic Chinese market, but in the general global market. That's something I think we will probably see in the Top500 very soon that these companies are successful also outside China," Simon said. Enditem