The Hindu : Japan ahead in supercomputing race

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 23, 2002

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Japan ahead in supercomputing race

By Anand Parthasarathy

Kochi April 22. The world's computing elite — the handful of nations including India which have designed, built and marketed their own supercomputers — is still to react to Sunday's startling news: that a Japanese company, NEC, has zoomed ahead to deliver a machine, at least five times faster than any other supercomputing platform in the world.

The New York Times quoted Jack Dongorra, a computer science professor at the University of Tennessee, whose benchmarking programme is accepted by the industry to compare the performance of ultra speed computers. He reported that recent tests showed that a supercomputer built by NEC had achieved a computing speed of 35.6 teraflops (one teraflops means one trillion operations per second). This record is expected to be ratified at the International Supercomputing Conference to be held in Heidelberg, Germany on June 19, when the Universities of Tennessee (U.S.) and Mannheim (Germany) jointly publish the latest `Top 500' — a semi-annual ranking of the world's 500 fastest computers.

For many years, American supercomputers have hogged most of the `Top 10' positions in the list: in the last edition of Top 500 updated in November 2001, 9 of the 10 positions are claimed by U.S.-made machines delivered by Intel, IBM, Compaq and SGI, with IBM's `ASCI White' (for Advanced Super Computing Initiative) made for the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, rated as number 1 with a speed of just over 7 teraflops. The new Japanese claimant for the title matches the combined raw processing power of the top 20 American computers.

In a research niche where every teraflop achieved costs millions of research hours and dollars, the Japanese achievement presents an interesting technical point: The U.S. supercomputers — and much of the global effort — has tended to achieve superfast computational speeds by harnessing the power of parallel processing: chopping up a complex problem into manageable chunks and working on them simultaneously with hundreds of separate machines.

The Japanese, on the other hand, have always sworn by the classical "sledgehammer'' approach known as Vector processing, where the number of identical processors is relatively small — but each is a custom-made leviathan on its own, attacking the problem in a serial fashion.

NEC achieved its latest speeds by a clever "combo'' of both methods, calling its machine a "vector parallel computer'': it consists of 640 "nodes'', each of which uses 8 vector processors, clocking 8 gigaflops per processor (one gigaflop is one billion operations per second). NEC's customer for its supercomputer is the Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences where it will be used to create a virtual "Earth Simulator'' — a massive replica of the planet's environmental phenomena like global warming, pollution, cyclones, earthquakes etc. The system, which occupies space equal to four tennis courts, was delivered by NEC on March 8. By processing vast amounts of data at lightning speed, the Institute hopes to help provide warnings of typhoons and other natural processes which plague that part of the world, even while helping to understand worldwide phenomena like "El Nino''.

American analysts today were voicing concern that, while Japan puts its supercomputing muscle into such globally relevant and "earthy'' concerns, the U.S. largely tended to use its fastest computers to simulate nuclear tests and weapons.

In a related development, the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), has announced that it will shortly create a national network of supercomputers, initially linking the IITs and the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science (IISc). The C-DAC Director, R.K. Arora, has told Reuters that the network would facilitate peer-to-peer sharing of resources and the joint solving of large problems. Its own Param supercomputer has been tested at speeds of 100 gigaflops and can be scaled to become a teraflop machine. The C-DAC inspired grid is expected to help India establish a presence in the burgeoning area of bio informatics — the harnessing of Information Technology for biotechnology applications.

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