Dawning 5000
China’s first over 100 trillion times/s computer, the Dawning 5000, developed and produced independently by the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Dawning, has been announced.
The announcement uses a speed measure which is somewhat misleading to people outside of the business. Thus a history of the Dawning may help.
The very first Dawning is Dawning No.1 (Shuguang Yihao) which was demonstrated in 1993 . This supercomputer achieved 640 million FLOPS. This FLOPS word is a measure of speed where FLOPS are floating point operations per second; a measure of memory access performance. This gives you the rate at which a machine can perform single-precision floating-point calculations.
This first supercomputer ran with Unix.
Dawning 1000 was originally called Dawning No.2 (Shuguang Erhao) and appeared in May, 1995. This could do a billion FLOPS which made it the first true Chinese built supercomputer.
In 2000 came the Dawning 2000, and a year later the Dawning 3000.
The Dawning 4000 was a huge leap forward. It started as one of the ten fastest supercomputers in the world and initially could do 806.1 billion FLOPS. Thus it was nearly a thousand times faster then the Dawning 1000.
Now comes the Dawning 5000 which is capable of 160 trillion FLOPS. It is probably the seventh fastest supercomputer in the world. This system will be installed at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center. What do you use the sort of speed for? Genome mapping, quake appraisal, precise weather forecast, mining survey and huge stock exchange data. You use it where you need massive computer processing power.
So where do we go from here? Think first of a trillionFLOPS which is teraFLOP performance where a single teraFLOP is equal to 1000 (or 1024) gigaFLOPS.
About 2010 we should see petaFLOP performance where each petaFLOP is equal to 1000 (or, to be very precise, 1,024) teraFLOPS.
China is the second country — the US was first — to have created and applied supercomputers of this sort of speed.
Is this as far as we can go? Not in naming and almost certainly not in experimentation. Speeds will inevitably increase.
After petaFLOPS, multiplying by 1,000 every time, we have exaFLOPS, zettaFLOPS and yottaFLOPS. We will not reach yottaFLOPS in your time. Possibly not even in mine.
Source: English People’s Daily Online