- [Narrator] This is Frontier, the US supercomputer
that was crowned the world's speediest this year
by the TOP500 project,
which ranks supercomputing systems globally.
And the machine is able to do
one quintillion calculations per second.
Write it out, that's 18 zeros
and that means it's about 2 billion times faster
than a typical laptop.
China's Tianhe-3 didn't participate in this ranking
but some computer scientists say the machine
may be as fast as Frontier.
- These supercomputers are utilized to solve
some of the most pressing challenges that humanity
and society faces.
- [Narrator] Whether it's developing
more advanced spacecraft or figuring out a greener future,
both countries are racing to build faster machines.
So to better solve the challenges
the US has opened up Frontier to scientists around the world
and we got access to look inside it
in order to compare its design with Tianhe-3
and see what it takes to build
one of the world's speediest supercomputers.
- We want to provide this level of compute capability
that has never, never been achieved before.
- Thomas Zacharia is the director
of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee,
a lab sponsor by the US Department of Energy.
He's worked on over a dozen supercomputers in the US,
and now leads the team that oversees
the operation of Frontier.
- US has been a leader in supercomputing
for a long, long time.
- [Narrator] Since the 1960s,
US supercomputers have mostly dominated the field
until China joined the race.
- China really started dealing with
high performance computers in a serious way back in 2001.
- Jack Dongarra is a computer scientist based in the US
and he's one of the founders of the TOP500 project.
He's been closely watching China
since it made its debut on the list in 2001.
- [Jack] It's quite a change
over a very short period of time, roughly 20 years,
going from nothing to being dominant.
- [Narrator] China hasn't revealed
how much it's invested in supercomputing,
but since 2006 Beijing has put it into the country's
five-year plan, which is a blueprint
for China's economic development.
Today the country has more supercomputers
on the TOP500 list than the US,
but this year Chinese researchers didn't submit
Tianhe-3 results.
And some computer scientists say
given how quickly Chinese machines have improved,
Tianhe-3 may be as fast as Frontier,
reaching the speed of a quintillion calculations per second.
Scientists call this exascale performance.
And to do that both the US and China started with this part.
- A compute node is fundamentally
the building block of a supercomputer.
- [Narrator] An individual compute node
is basically like your personal computer
and take Frontier as an example.
It mainly has two sets of chips.
The central processing units or CPUs
are the heart of the machine that carries out instructions
and accelerators help boost the performance of the CPUs.
- So you can imagine supercomputer as stacking up
a whole bunch of those individual computers
with a very, very fast network.
So this is what a Frontier cabinet looks like.
Frontier has got 74 cabinets.
Each cabinet's about 8,000 pounds.
It has 9,408 nodes.
The nodes are connected to everyone, each other
and can transfer information very fast.
- [Narrator] Tianhe-3 also has cabinets with compute nodes
but China hasn't disclosed the size of its machine.
Some computer scientists say
that based on state media footage and presentations
by Tianhe-3's researchers,
the machine may have a hundred cabinets
and more than 50,000 nodes.
But what really differentiates
these two massive supercomputers
are the tiny chips inside, because they're key to deciding
the speed and computing capabilities.
And that's an area where the US has an advantage over China.
American scientists have access to some of the most
cutting-edge technologies from semiconductor designers
and producers at home.
And Frontier's two chips come from one of the leading
American semiconductor developers Advanced Micro Devices.
Zacharia says the company has worked closely with the lab
to design these chips.
And that partnership has helped Frontier
officially become the first exascale machine.
- These are the latest in their evolution.
They are designed and manufactured processors
specifically with a view to building the supercomputer
and delivering the performance that is needed.
- [Narrator] China on the other hand
has not had a home field advantage with chips.
It used to rely on American companies like Intel and Nvidia
but that became impossible in 2015
when the US barred its semiconductor makers
from selling to Chinese institutions
that develop supercomputers,
including the one that builds Tianhe-3.
- So the Tianhe people who were planning to build
the next machine decided that they needed to,
because they couldn't use Western parts
they had to design their own chips.
- [Narrator] China's National Supercomputer Center
didn't respond to a request for comment
about the performance and chip design of Tianhe-3.
But ultimately building these supercomputers
isn't just about achieving fast speed.
- It goes back to science and doing the best science.
So countries that have the fastest supercomputers
can carry out simulations, which have greater fidelity
and they can get results back much quicker.
- [Narrator] For example, getting those results quickly
was critical during the pandemic.
Frontier was deployed to analyze 11 million genomes
to better distinguish and predict variants.
- It has given us clues to develop
the next generation of vaccines,
the next generation of therapeutics,
to not only treat and prevent COVID,
but also for other kind of ailments.
- [Narrator] And to better solve
some of the world's most pressing challenges,
the lab is awarding scientists from around the world
time to use Frontier based on the merit of their research
and ensuring they're required to publish their findings.
- It's an important part of doing science
is exchanging information.
We express our ideas
and show one choice is better than another.
And through that exchange we hopefully end up
with a better situation.
- [Narrator] China has also said it welcomes scientists
from other countries to run research on Tianhe-3,
but so far the machine has only been used
by institutions backed by the Chinese government,
like the country's top research group
the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
- The annoying thing is that we don't hear much
about these computers.
In the west it's a problem, I would say.
I'm waiting for the time that we can have more interchanges.
- [Narrator] Until then, this segregation of research
could slow down progress even as both the US and China
are united in finding ways to accelerate
their supercomputers.
(upbeat music)