Wuxi team wins top honor in high-performance computing

Chinese developed supercomputer Sunway Taihu-Light operates at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, East China's Jiangsu province, on June 20, 2016. [Photo/VCG]

A quantum computational project that the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi participated in won the 2021 ACM Gordon Bell Award, a top honor in high-performance computing, on Nov 19.

The winning project was titled, "Closing the 'Quantum Supremacy' Gap: Achieving Real-Time Simulation of a Random Circuit Using a New Sunway Supercomputer".

In the work, the researchers introduced a systematic design process that covers the algorithms, parallelization, and architecture required for the simulation. Using a new Sunway Supercomputer, the Chinese team effectively simulated a 10x10x (1+40+1) random quantum circuit, a new milestone for classical simulation of RQC. Their simulation achieved a performance of 1.2 Eflops (one quintillion floating-point operations per second) single-precision, or 4.4 Eflops mixed-precision, using over 41.9 million Sunway cores (processors).

In the past six years, the team of the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi has carried out extensive cross-disciplinary and cross-industry cooperation, which has helped it to achieve results of parallel applications based on the Wuxi-made Sunway Taihu-Light, China's first supercomputer to use domestically designed processors.

Two projects based on the Sunway Taihu-Light have previously won the ACM Gordon Bell Award - the project named "10M-Core Scalable Fully-Implicit Solver for Nonhydrostatic Atmospheric Dynamics" in 2016 and the project named "18.9-Pflops Nonlinear Earthquake Simulation on Sunway TaihuLight: Enabling Depiction of 18-Hz and 8-Meter Scenarios" in 2017.

The National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi will continue to carry out domestically-made independent system research and development, spanning chips, servers, supercomputing (intelligent computing) systems, and system software. It will also work to build a full-stack domestic high-performance computing application ecosystem relying on the existing foundation of the supercomputing center.