Supercomputer, head to head between the US and China (with Sunway)
China announced that its Sunway supercomputer was able to reproduce a model of artificial intelligence. The article by Giuseppe Gagliano
China announced that its supercomputer was able to reproduce a model of artificial intelligence. We are talking about the Chinese supercomputer called Sunway of the latest generation on par with Frontier, the latest machine built by the US Department of Energy, which earlier this month was named the most powerful in the world.
The Chinese team used the Sunway machine to train the artificial intelligence model – called bagualu which means “alchemist's vessel” – with 174 trillion parameters, rivaling the number of synapses in the brain for the first time.
Potential uses include autonomous vehicles and facial recognition, as well as natural language processing, computer vision, life sciences, and chemistry. The findings were presented at a virtual meeting of Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming 2022, an international conference hosted by the United States-based Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in April.
A member of the research team confirmed the authenticity of the presentation in June, but asked not to be named due to the delicacy of the topic. The latest Sunway has a speed of one billion billion operations per second, expressed as 5.3 floating point operations per second (exaflop) and over 37 million CPU cores, four times faster than Frontier, according to the researchers. .
The Sunway, with nine petabytes of memory – equivalent to more than two million DVD-quality movies – and 96,000 semi-independent computer systems called nodes, resembled a powerful human brain, they said. Communication between nodes at speeds greater than 23 petabytes per second, for example, simulates a change of mind. One researcher claimed that the machine's parallel computing capability mimicked human thinking "like eating while watching television."
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/supercomputer-testa-a-testa-tra-usa-e-cina-con-sunway/ on Thu, 23 Jun 2022 08:03:24 +0000.