One of the top minds in supercomputing has a warning for the West. Jack Dongarra, an industry luminary, Turing award laureate and co-founder of TOP500, the de-facto supercomputer listing and benchmarking process that’s responsible for bringing clarity to how the world stands in processing capability, says the US is likely behind China in the supercomputing race.
When Dongarra says this, it isn’t lightly. It follows that the official picture provided by TOP500, which he co-founded, isn’t an accurate representation of reality. Because according to the TOP500, China comes in at a distant 7th (with the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer) and 10th place (Tianhe-2) – trillions of calculations per second away from the top-dog, the US-based (and AMD powered) Frontier exascale computer.
“It’s a well known situation that China has these computers, and they have been operating for a while,” Dongarra told the South China Morning Post. “They have not run the benchmarks, but [the community has] a general idea of their architectures and capabilities based on research papers published to describe the science coming out of those machines.”
But we know the country has installed (or at least, announced it had installed) as many as three “exascale” supercomputers. They are the Sunway OceanLight developed by the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi; the Tianhe-3 by the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, which was crunching AI workloads before it became mainstream; and an unnamed supercomputer by China-based Sugon at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen. Sugon earned itself a place on the blacklist as early as June 24th 2019 partly owing to that feat.
China’s OceanLight even stood toe to toe with the exascale Frontier back on August 2022, as it fought it for the Gordon Bell prize. Frontier did end up winning the prize, and has in the meantime been upgraded, but time passes in the East exactly the same as it does in the West.
Despite the fact we have a suggestion of how these machines perform, none of them are listed. In fact, China doesn’t currently crack the top five. Against the outlook of that Gordon Bell struggle, however, it looks unlikely that is representative of China’s capabilities.
But then, we know statistics and analysis aren’t always correct. For one, they can’t account for missing data.
The TOP500 being a voluntary listing means that most won’t step up to the task. And when we consider the current geopolitical climate, one can see see how it isn’t conducive to transparency and openness and a “head first” participation style. Perhaps China would even feel compelled to hide certain supercomputer deployments – at least, its entries into the listing have substantially declined in the last two years (a perfect coincidence with harder sanctions being deployed starting two years ago).
A voluntary listing is easily manipulated: you can essentially look at the TOP500 spreadsheet yourself and insert some supercomputers here and there. In theory, you can even play a game where you centrally plan which institutions submit which benchmarks to which listing.
And that’s not just China. With the TOP500 being voluntary, politicized, and a hierarchical and competitive benchmark leave little room for misplays within the world’s stage. At least, that seems to be the opinion of the TOP500 founder himself.
“Maybe having the No.1 computer would make news and put China under the spotlight,” Dongarra told the SCMP. “It can cause the US to take actions against China that would further restrict technologies from flowing into China.”
It’s interesting how Dongarra’s observation maps onto reality: China having the top supercomputer would definitely make the news. And when it comes to tech restrictions being imposed or aggravated, well, we’ve had a couple of years of that already.
We’ve all felt the consequences of this, at some point or another. Of course, there’s still the open question of whether the sanctions are actually doing what they are intended to – restrict China’s ability to catch-up to the U.S. technologically and economically. Chinese companies being publicly bullish about recouping sanction-imposed losses in a year’s time has to put at least a question mark over the effectiveness of them in the first place.
