Use of Arm cores and Linux mean Beijing hasn’t broken away from the world
The TOP500 list of Earth’s mightiest supercomputers has a new leader: the 2.198 Exaflop/s LineShine machine housed at the National Supercomputer Center (NSC) in Shenzhen, which took the top spot without using any kit from Nvidia, Intel, or AMD.Which is not to say that LineShine is an entirely Chinese creation. As explained in a pre-press paper, the machine’s LX2 processors are a local effort but use Armv9 designs – so chalk up a win for Blighty, the home of Arm. The machine also runs KylinOS – a Linux distribution that features contributions from around the world.The paper reveals that LineShine comprises 20,480 computing nodes, and that each LX2 processor “integrates two compute dies (304 cores total) and eight on-package HBM stacks (32 GB, 4 TB/s aggregate bandwidth).”
“Each compute die contains 152 cores and 128 GB of off-package DDR memory organized into four NUMA domains,” the paper adds. “A dedicated SDMA engine handles data movement between DDR and HBM. The LX2 supports FP64/FP32/FP16/INT8 via SME and SVE units, delivering up to 60.3/120.6 TFLOPS in FP64/FP32. Nodes are interconnected via the LingQi high-speed network with a dual-plane multi-rail fat-tree topology, offering 1.6 Tb/s bandwidth per node.”
