Welcome!

Linux Authors: Arsalan Farooq, Maureen O'Gara, Jeremy Geelan, Glenn Rossman, Jeremy Hess

Related Topics: Virtualization, SOA & WOA, Linux

Virtualization: Article

China Reportedly Develops Its Own Processor

Last year China built what was for six months the world’s fastest supercomputer out of Intel and Nvidia parts
By Maureen O'Gara
Article Rating:
November 7, 2011 07:00 AM EST
Reads:
 1,909

China says it's developed a Linux-running supercomputer using a natively developed 16-core 64-bit RISC chip called the ShenWei SW1600.

It's unclear if the Chinese started from scratch with a brand new architecture or based the processor on existing American designs. Reports suggest it could be a reverse engineered DEC Alpha 21164, others something beholden to Intel. It's supposed to be capable of 140 Gflops at 1.1GHz.

Last year China built what was for six months the world's fastest supercomputer out of Intel and Nvidia parts. It was dethroned by a Fujitsu machine using Sparc chips.

The ShenWei system is called the Sunway BlueLight MPP and is reportedly capable of 795 teraflops (sustained) or 1.07 petaflops (peak). It's 40% as fast as the award-winning Tianhe-1A, which was ultimately deemed to have little practical purpose, but Sunway apparently only needs a megawatt worth of power using a sophisticated water-cooling system.

The system's 8,704 processors fit in nine racks. There's 150TB of memory and 2PB of storage.

Published November 7, 2011 – Reads 1,909
Copyright © 2011 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.