A scientist conducts a system test of supercomputer Tianhe-1, the predecessor of Tianhe-1A, in Tianjin, in this file photo taken in December 2009. The computer was capable of making a quadrillion (a thousand billion) floating point operations per second.[Photo/Xinhua]

Tianhe-1A makes fast work of ensuring safety of national projects. Zhou Wa in Beijing reports.

Wang Litao read the numbers on his computer screen and sat back, delighted.

The researcher, who was studying the damage Xiluodu Dam could withstand in an earthquake, had waited a month for the outcome of his team's complex simulations - but after entering his equation into Tianhe-1A, his results took just one hour.

Using the fastest supercomputer in the world, experts like Wang at the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR) can help ensure the hydroelectric dam is stronger and safer for the millions who live along Jinsha River.

"The process has been shortened significantly allowing us to offer and analyze more solutions in the same amount of time," said Wang. "We can offer solutions faster to improve safety."

The dam is one of thousands of projects that will benefit from Tianhe-1A (named after the Milky Way), from research in geology, meteorology and medicine, to commercial design, construction and manufacturing.

"It could even save people's lives," said Wang, who explained that, in a landslide, the supercomputer could calculate where reinforcements are needed and what areas should be evacuated.

Xiluodu Dam, which is being constructed on Southwest China's Sichuan-Yunnan provincial boundary, is a key part of ambitious plans to build China's second largest hydropower plant. Once in operation, it will generate 12,600 megawatts of electricity.

As the area is prone to earthquakes, however, engineers must ensure it can survive a major eruption. If not, the water in its reservoir will flood every nearby city and village.

"What's worse, a flood from the upper reaches could even lead to the bursting of the Three Gorges Dam," said Wang, threatening the lives and property of 400 million inhabitants along the Yangtze.

"To avoid this disaster, we need to build a safer dam," he added.

The large capacity of Tianhe-1A - 2.57 petaflops, or quadrillion calculations per second - allows researchers to solve equations with far more variables, making their measurement more accurate.

Even without testing the supercomputer to the full, Wang was able to use a program that answered an equation with 500,000 unknown numbers.

Developed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Hunan's provincial capital, Changsha, Tianhe-1A is also a boon for big business.

As in the case of Xiluodu, experts say the machine will help workers in commercial research and development departments find ways to improve the precision and manufacture of products, giving them a greater competitive edge.

Tianjin Motor Dies Co Ltd, which designs and manufactures car body panels and large stamping parts, is the largest of its kind in China and sells to auto giants like General Motors, Ford and BMW.

After employing Tianhe-1A to simulate its stamping process, "we expect to raise our market share" and "make the transition from offering low-end to the high-end products", explained Chen Huibin, one of Tianjin Motor Dies' experts in computer-aided engineering.

Thanks to the simulation, the company will save at least 450,000 yuan, or 3 percent of costs in producing automobile side panels.

"It's a large saving," said Chen, "because our profit margins are only about 20-percent profit."

Hu Qingfeng, deputy chief designer of Tianhe-1A, which is based at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, said the supercomputer will also speed up manufacture of aircraft's core units using Chinese intellectual property.

Engineers can simulate wind tunnel trials and study the combustion process inside aircraft engines.

Fission and chips

Tianhe-1A was named No 1 in the latest rankings by Top500, an organization that collates information on high-powered computing, pushing Cray XT5 Jaguar in the United States into second place and Nebulae in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, into third.

Although China has two in the top 10, the field is still dominated by the US, which accounts for more than half of the supercomputers on the Top500 list.

Experts explained that despite major breakthroughs, work on supercomputing in China continues to be hampered by global difficulties with power supplies and human resources.

High-powered supercomputers soak up a lot of electricity and could prove a drain on the State Grid. As a solution, some experts have suggested systems are built near nuclear power plants to meet their consumption demands. However, with only 16 plants in operation (another seven are under construction), there is doubt the country has enough nuclear facilities to power even the 41 supercomputers it already has in the Top500 list.

Therefore, the mission for technicians is to build supercomputers that require less power.

Hu Qingfeng at NUDT suggested three possible solutions: develop low-power hardware, like central processing units (CPUs); make the computers' architecture more energy-efficient, such as replacing CPUs with energy-saving graphics processing units (GPUs), which Tianhe-1A has; or create a low-energy mechanism that integrates hardware and software.

The last option, explained Hu, means the software can first analyze the program, which will be run on the supercomputer, and evaluate how many hardware elements are necessary, shutting down those that are non-essential.

The manpower issue is another challenge altogether. As the number of people who can develop CPUs for supercomputer, as well as the software they operate, is extremely low worldwide, it is a problem affecting the entire industry.

With competition extremely fierce, poaching is now common.

According to Li Nan, chief project manager on the Tianhe-1A project, there were several overseas companies attempting to lure away his micro-electronics experts with one offered an annual salary of $300,000.

Lu Yutong, a professor at NUDT and a member of Li's team, also revealed that she was given the chance by a university to become a visiting scholar in 2008.

"I gave it up because I wanted to work on Tianhe-1A," she told China Daily. "I have absolutely no regrets."

Software engineers are usually expected to be familiar with computer science, programming and related applications like meteorology, geology and microphysics. Added to the complexity of supercomputing, finding suitable staff can be difficult.

"This software must make sure tens of thousands of processing units function concurrently and properly," said Yang Chao, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' institute of software, who tested Tianhe-1A's CPU system for climate modeling and astrophysics study.

"Just like commanding a battle, it's easy to lead a platoon of 100 soldiers but much more difficult to conduct tens of thousands."

Making the machine

Seymour Cray, the so-called "father of supercomputing", designed the first high-powered machines in the early 1960s while working for the Control Data Corporation. A decade later, he left to start his own business, Cray Research, which has dominated the field ever since.

Although smaller competitors have challenged for a share of the market, most disappeared without a trace when the market crashed in the mid-1990s. Today, supercomputers are typically produced by Cray, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Technicians at Chinese Academy of Sciences' institute of computing technology (ITC) built the nation's first computer in 1958, two years after the unveiling of China's first national plan on scientific and technological development (1956-1967).

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However, development hit a hurdle during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), when the "distance between the world and us was enlarged again", said Li Guojie, director of the ITC.

In 1978, then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping chose NUDT as one of the major institutions to develop China's own supercomputer and, five years later, the college produced its first supercomputer. It could perform 100 million calculations a second.

Central authorities made research into the national environment for high performance computing, a part of the 863 Program, a State-sponsored development initiative, in the 9th Five-Year Plan (1996-2000), later including related software.

Supercomputing made the headlines in 2007, when Dawning, makers of the Nebulae, helped China National Petroleum Corporation discover 100 million tons of oil reserves underneath Nanpu in Hebei province.

The next target for the Tianhe-1A team is to build a machine that can perform tens of petaflops per second, as well developing new CPUs and GPUs.

Although the supercomputer uses the FT-1000 (a CPU developed by NUDT), it largely runs on the 14,336 CPUs made by Intel, the US chipmakers, and 7,186 GPUs from Nvidia, also based in the US. In other words, Tianhe-1A relies on US firms.

"Perhaps future generations of the FT-1000 can be used as a replacement for the Intel part of the system," Jack Dongarra, a supercomputing expert who compiles the Top500 list, told China Daily through e-mail.