In June 2016, a significant and unusual event occurred in the world
of supercomputing – the sector that specializes in very high speed
computers that are used for applications such as weather forecasting
and advanced weapons design. It was announced that the fastest
supercomputer in the world was now the Sunway TaihuLight, a Chinese
machine, which had performed at a speed of 93 petaflops – three times
faster than the previous leader.
Chinese supercomputers have been leading the field since 2011, but
until now had depended to a large extent on key hardware components
from American companies. What made the June 2016 event unusual was the
announcement that, in a first for the industry, the Sunway TaihuLight
was powered entirely by Chinese-designed and Chinese-manufactured
processor chips. In other words, the new machine was evidence that China
had mastered the entire computer engineering cycle, from
conceptualization to detailed design and manufacture of individual
semiconductor components. For the first time in the history of
computing, the leadership at the cutting edge of a strategic technology
– supercomputers – had passed from the United States to China.
Brief History of Supercomputing
To understand how this happened, and why countries like Japan,
India, and many in the European Union have been overtaken by China, it
is useful to understand the history of supercomputing, or High
Performance Computing (HPC) as it is also referred to. The idea of HPC –
specialized machines designed to operate at ever faster speeds to solve
the most complex of real world problems – is universally credited to
Seymour Cray, the legendary American computer designer. In 1964, the
world’s first supercomputer, the Control Data Corporation CDC 6600, was
designed and manufactured under Cray’s supervision and leadership. For
almost the next 50 years, with a few exceptions, it was always a
US-built supercomputer that set the trend.
Within that half century were contained two stages, or eras, in
supercomputer development. The first era is usually referred to as the
Monocomputer Era, and this lasted from around 1960 to 1995. The
Monocomputer architecture utilized a single high speed processor
accessing data stored in a single memory stack. Since this architecture
was first developed by Seymour Cray and was used by all supercomputers
in this era, the first era is also sometimes referred to as the
Seymour Cray era of hardware.
In the early 1980s, a radically different approach began to be
adopted. This new approach, or architecture, used the idea that many
computers or processors operating in parallel could do the job faster
than a single computer using the single processor Cray architecture.
Thus began the Multicomputer Era, which overlapped with the first era
starting around 1985, and is continuing till date. The Multicomputer era
places far greater emphasis on the software that distributes the work
between different processors, and is thus also sometimes referred to as
the Multicomputer Era of the programmer.
One very unusual feature of the early days of supercomputing was
that developments took place entirely in the American private sector.
It was only when the Europeans and the Japanese also started work on
their own supercomputers that the US government began to take an active
interest. Nevertheless, it was only in 1995 that the first formal US
government policy – called the Accelerated Strategic Computing
Initiative or ASCI – was announced. The European and Japanese
initiatives, in contrast, were driven by their governments and
universities.
The chart below tabulates the progress of supercomputers through
the two eras. On the X-axis is plotted the year of introduction of the
captioned machines; and on the Y-axis the speed of each machine in
Gigaflops, measured by the industry standard Linpack Benchmark. As the
chart shows, speeds of supercomputers have been doubling every two
years.
India’s Supercomputing Efforts
The supercomputer effort in India began in the late 1980s, when the
US stopped the export of a Cray supercomputer because of continuing
technology embargoes. In response, the Indian government set up the
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) with the mission
of building an indigenous supercomputer. In 1990, C-DAC unveiled the
prototype of the PARAM 800, a multiprocessor machine, the first outcome
of the new programme. PARAM was benchmarked at 5 Gflops, making it the
second fastest supercomputer in the world at that time.
How China Achieved Dominance in Supercomputing
What, meanwhile, of China? Historical records show that China had
developed an interest in HPC as early as the 1950s and 1960s. During
the Mao era, even at the height of the excesses of the Cultural
Revolution, and in spite of the removal of Soviet assistance after the
Sino-Soviet split, the Chinese computer programme proceeded without let
up. By the end of the 1960s, China was manufacturing its own integrated
circuits and integrating them into indigenous third generation
computers, making China in some respects even more advanced than the
USSR.
In July 1972, barely four months after the epochal visit of US
President Richard Nixon to China, a delegation of American computer
scientists visited China at the invitation of the Chinese government,
and spent three weeks with their Chinese counterparts. While they were
suitably impressed by the strides made by the Chinese in mastering the
technology, it was the perspective and objectives of the Chinese
technology programme that really gave them pause.
The Chinese, it turned out, were not interested in the small and
inexpensive “minicomputers” which were at that time taking the US and
Europe by storm. What they were really interested in were the high
speed machines such as the CDC Star, which were considered the state of
the art in the early 1970s. It was evident to the American delegation
that matching US capability in this area was a major objective of the
Chinese. The delegation made this observation in the report they
subsequently published in the journal
Science.
The Chinese interest in supercomputing thus seems to have been
established very early and remained constant during the decades of
political turmoil in the 1960s and 1970s. This interest was
institutionalized very substantially in March 1986, when Deng Xiaoping
initiated the famed ‘863’ programme to acquire parity with the US, and
with the rest of the world, across a range of high technology sectors.
For supercomputing to develop, a host of other industries and sectors
had to develop as well, such as semiconductor manufacture, design of
integrated circuits, expertise in the mining and refining of rare
earths, etc. All of these were integrated well into the 863 programme.
It took two decades for these efforts to bear fruit. In 2006,
Chinese supercomputers entered the Top 500 list for the first time. At
that point, India had eight supercomputers on the list, which was
otherwise dominated almost entirely by the Americans, albeit with
strong competition from the Japanese at the top of the list. 10 years
later, in 2016, China leads the Top 500 list with 169 machines,
including the Sunway TaihuLight, the world’s fastest at 93 petaflops as
mentioned earlier. The US comes second, with 165 machines. Europe as a
whole has about 110 machines, and Japan barely 40, although it is to
the Japanese credit that the average speed of their supercomputers is
the highest. India, unfortunately, has stayed nearly static with only
nine systems in the Top 500 list.
Supercomputers are the second sector where China has established
global leadership, the first being rare earths mining and refining, in
which it holds a 95 per cent market share. But China’s growing
dominance in the supercomputer sector displays capabilities that go
well beyond the specialized mining and refining technologies that
characterize the rare earths sector.
Prerequisites for Making the Fastest Supercomputer
Developing the world’s fastest supercomputer requires capabilities
that start with pure science – specifically quantum physics and the
electrodynamics of semiconductors. Allied with this is the requirement
of a highly educated and competent cadre of computer scientists who
understand the complexities of such abstract computer science concepts
as the ‘theory of computation’ and are able to apply these concepts to
developing efficient algorithms that can solve very complex real world
problems. Building up a cadre of scientists with such specialized
knowledge requires decades of effort, which the Chinese have
systematically put in. This needs to be combined with the capacity to
design Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) integrated circuits,
including complex microprocessors that are as good as, if not better
than, American products.
A host of networking and connectivity technologies that enable large
numbers of processors to operate efficiently in parallel – the Sunway
has over 10 million parallel processors – need to be mastered for the
design to even reach the prototype stage.
Many seemingly unconnected technologies are associated with
supercomputers. For example, HPC machines consume enormous amounts of
power – the Sunway alone consumes as much as 28 MW. It is to the credit
of Chinese scientists that the home-grown processors used in the
Sunway are actually three times as energy efficient as the nearest
American equivalents. The physical design of the machine, including the
cooling system, is itself a mechanical and metallurgical engineering
challenge.
Finally, for supercomputers to be effective, they need to be
loaded with a large suite of specialized software packages, ranging
from operating systems that cater for the multiprocessor environment to
the application suites capable of executing algorithms that help solve
the truly complex real world problems such as weather forecasting, very
big data analysis, biomedical modelling, and of course
security-related applications such as cryptography, advanced aerospace
engineering and weapon systems design.
Future Trends in Supercomputing
This raises the questions: Do countries like India stand a chance in
this race? And, what can they do? The answers may lie in a careful
analysis of future trends.
The Chinese mastery of the wide range of technologies positions
them well for winning the next race in supercomputers, which is
breaking the “exascale barrier”. In simple terms, this is the race to
determine who first succeeds in constructing a supercomputer that is
capable of a speed of one exaflop per second, or one thousand million
Gigaflops, one Gigaflop itself being one thousand million floating point
operations per second. There are four countries in the race – China,
the US, France and Japan. China looks well set to win the race in the
year 2018.
France and Japan have both indicated that they would achieve the
objective by 2020, and the US has conservatively indicated 2023. But
the US has also stated that it expects to regain long term leadership.
The exascale barrier is a landmark for supercomputers for reasons
that go beyond the mere desire to be the first. Supercomputers
operating at such incredible speeds will encounter a variety of
barriers that previous generations of designers did not have to contend
with. For example, the network and interconnectivity hardware that
allows millions of processors to operate in parallel will have to speed
up by an order of magnitude to accommodate exascale performance.
Similarly, the cooling system will become a central design constraint –
a statement that supercomputer engineers are wont to make is that
future HPC machines may need their own independent nuclear reactor for
power supply and cooling!
What India Needs to Do
All this brings back into focus the need for innovation. One
outstanding feature of the supercomputer sector is that innovation is
always taking place across the entire cycle, from new theories of
computation to the design of chips and to new forms of software. Unlike
other sectors which stabilize based on commercial considerations sooner
or later, the innovation pot is always boiling over in the case of
supercomputers. This is both a daunting barrier and an exciting
opportunity for countries like India. There are several imperatives if
India is to regain some measure of competitiveness in this
strategically vital sector.
First, India must move away from the perspective which it has
allowed to dominate, namely, that the application of supercomputers is
more important than supercomputer technologies themselves. In this
perspective, it does not matter whether an HPC machine is indigenous or
imported, as long as it is usefully applied. This perspective ignores
the strategic importance of supercomputers and the abundant evidence
that all major countries view these technologies as critical.
Second, India must understand that it is possible to start from
the current state of the art itself. There is no need to entirely
retrace the path already taken by China and the other countries. Using
technological expertise that is available with the global network of
Indian and Indian-origin scientists and engineers, it is possible to
start from a baseline which is already advanced. In addition, the
software skills and personnel base that India has built up in the
public and private sectors can be effectively leveraged to propel
innovation on the software components of supercomputer technology.
Third, India has to understand that supercomputer research always
requires fundamental research into the next stages of computing. Thus,
going beyond the exascale barrier might require new approaches that are
right now only in the theoretical stage – quantum computing, for
example, has been only spoken about in research forums, but may well
turn out to be the basis of the next leap forward. The time frames
required to operationalize and commercialize nascent technologies are
shrinking, and this is something that needs to be factored into the
Indian approach.
Fourth, India should set itself clear objectives of what it wants
to achieve in this strategically significant sector. The Chinese
perspective is telling – over 50 years ago, China set itself the clear
objective of parity with the United States. While the setting up of the
National Supercomputer Mission in 2015
is a laudable first step, it needs to be followed up by the
identification of clear objectives and allocation of adequate
resources. Within a Mission perspective, it should be possible to cut
down bureaucratic red tape and allow scientists and engineers to take
bold and radical steps without fear of reprisal.
Finally, it needs to be appreciated that supercomputers are
strategic in the most important sense, namely, the creation of an
ecosystem that extends well beyond the boundaries of science and
technology and has the capacity to transform the country. A strong
supercomputer sector leads to capability in a variety of other fields,
from semiconductor manufacturing and precision engineering to optimal
strategies for agricultural production, urban planning and the like.
All this would be in addition to the national security related
applications where India cannot afford to be dependent on foreign
expertise. Building up capability in this sector requires active
government leadership to catalyse the establishment of a vibrant
academic infrastructure where research at the frontiers of physics and
material sciences, computational mathematics and computer science are
encouraged, to establish strong partnerships with industry for
technology transfer and commercial exploitation, and finally to create
widespread awareness of the possibilities and potential of
supercomputers. In the more advanced countries, using supercomputer
resources has become routine for a large and increasing percentage of
Fortune 500 companies. In China, the Sunway TaihuLight installation is
intended to function as a public service, with access available to all.
It may be simpler for India to catch up with these countries than is
commonly imagined. What is required are bold decisions that aim at
reaching comparative parity within the next decade.
