Sanctions don't seem to be working.
First up the very brief announcement via Xinhua and The State Council of the PRC, December 6:
China rolls out new-generation supercomputer
GUANGZHOU, Dec. 6 -- A new-generation supercomputing system "Tianhe Xingyi" was unveiled on Wednesday to boast greater capabilities in multiple areas, from computing power to storage to application.
The National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou unveiled the supercomputer in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province.
According to Lu Yutong, director of the center, the new computer has outperformed Tianhe-2, one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, in capacities such as CPU computing, network, storage and application.
Tianhe Xingyi's operation is expected to meet the rising computing demands in the fields of high-performance computing, artificial intelligence (AI) big model training and big data analysis, according to the center.
And from TheNextPlatform, also December 6:
What’s Inside China’s New Homegrown “Tianhe Xingyi” Supercomputer?
China is using a domestic processor as the backbone for double the performance of the Tianhe-2 system, which topped the Top 500 starting in 2013 and running through late 2015 before being overshadowed by the Sunway system in recent years. We have no official public details about Tianhe-3, although the assumption has been that it is/was at or near peak exascale computing capability (recall that China no longer publicly reports LINPACK benchmark results).
Today at the Supercomputing Innovation Application Conference in Guangzhou, researchers announced a new generation of the “Tianhe” machine called “Tianhe Xingyi”.
Reports indicate it is based on an advanced domestic architecture and as mentioned, doubles the performance of Tianhe-2. There is no mention of accelerators, only CPUs.
The best hints we have at this moment is that the new system is based on the MT3000 architecture. This is our own extrapolation, we are waiting confirmation. But…
If we were to make a guess, this is based on an extension of the DSP-driven Matrix 2000+ tech we described in April 2021 when detailing what architectural details we could glean about the Tianhe-3 machine, which was based on China’s native manycore Armv8-based Phytium 2000+ (FTP) and the Matrix 2000+ (MTP) processor/node architecture.
It would make sense that the new variant would be called MT3000 and lo and behold, the following requisition request from this year, seeking time on the system for wind field calculation mentions it directly:
Because the project needs to test and verify the dynamic wind field calculation software environment on a domestic high-performance computing system equipped with an MT3000 processor, it is necessary to purchase 360,000 node hours of domestic high-performance computing system computer time services. The Tianjin supercomputing host system is Tianhe-1 system (TH-1A) and Tianhe new generation system (including E-level verification system). Among them, Tianhe’s new generation system has computing nodes based on MT3000 processors, which can meet project needs. Currently, only Tianjin Supercomputer can provide a domestic high-performance computing environment based on MT3000 processors. Therefore, this procurement is planned to be carried out from a single source.
Another hint we have about the possible evolution of the architecture can be found in this ACM publication from early November this year. The research is from the same group at NUDT behind the original Tianhe machine architecture and could be referring to the Matrix 2000 to 3000 leap, but we are still closely reading to see the connection.
Chinese media on site at the Guangzhou event report that the system will “support various application modes of high-performance computing, AI large model training and big data analysis, which will further enhance the multi-field service capabilities of the Guangzhou Supercomputing Center and effectively meet the supercomputing application needs of various industries.”
Although it may not be connected, at the same event it was announced:....
....MUCH MORE
