China could have already built three exascale supercomputers. That may sound innocuous, but in the rarefied world of supercomputing, that is a big deal. More so because Beijing's computer scientists could have achieved the feat despite Washington's tough restrictions on transfer of advanced technology that China could use to gain a military edge over the United States.
But first what is an exascale computer? Consulting firm McKinsey & Co calls exascale "the next milestone in computing" in a report.
Computer performance is measured in FLOPS, or floating-point operations per second. The first supercomputer, which was developed in 1964, could run 3,000,000 FLOPS, i.e., 3 megaFLOPS. Exa means 18 zeros, meaning 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPS. An exascale computer can perform that many operations -- something that is almost impossible to imagine.
Now, there is a huge advantage to commanding that kind of computing power in today's world. Here is what the same McKinsey report says: "Exascale computing could allow scientists to solve problems that have until now been impossible. With exascale, exponential increases in memory, storage, and compute power may drive breakthroughs in several industries: energy production, storage, transmission, materials science, heavy industry, chemical design, AI and machine learning, cancer research and treatment, earthquake risk assessment, and many more."
Put simply, China now may have the computing power at its disposal to match, or even overtake, technology leaders like the United States in several areas that could be key to becoming the dominant economic and military power in the world. China could also pair its advances in artificial intelligence with this mind-boggling computering power and achieve technological and military dominance quite quickly.
And that could be why experts think China may be deliberately concealing the capabilities of its supercomputers, which could already have achieved superior performance to those built by the U.S.
Jack Dongarra, a Turing laureate and co-founder of the TOP500 supercomputer list, revealed in a recent interview that China's exascale computers may have a higher peak performance than supercomputers in other countries.
"It's a well known situation that China has these supercomputers, and they have been operating for a while. 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."
Dongarra made the comments after returning to the United States from a workshop on exascale computing software and algorithms in Beijing. The three next-gen supercomputers China has built are not on the TOP500 list, which is recognized as the most influential supercomputer systems ranking, but "China is still the country which produces the most supercomputers," Donggara said.
The supercomputer community has "long thought" that work on a third Chinese exascale supercomputer, being developed by China's Sugon, was halted indefinitely due to Washington's sanctions, per Tom's Hardware. Sugon was among the Chinese companies blacklisted by the Trump administration in 2019.
The blacklisting made Sugon lose access to Hygon CPUs, which run on processors based on California-based semiconductor company AMD's Zen design. It is now unclear which specific processors Sugon is using for its supercomputers.
Two years later, Intel was also banned from selling chips that would have helped upgrade one of its two known Chinese supercomputers -- the Tianhe-2 by China's National University of Defense Technology, which surpassed the U.S.'s Oak Ridge National Lab-made Titan in 2013. The other Chinese supercomputer is called Sunway OceanLight, developed by the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi.
It is "very likely" that China's supercomputers exceed the performance of computers in other countries, Michael Pecht, professor of Applied Mathematics and director of the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE), told International Business Times. Building supercomputers doesn't depend solely "on the latest and greatest chip" after all, he pointed out.
David Kahaner, director of the Asian Technology Information Program, said last year that China was looking to have 10 exascale supercomputers by 2025. While it is unclear how far China has advanced in its goal, Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU's Law School on sovereign wealth funds and author of "The Digital War – How China's Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace," told IBT that the Chinese government has consistently increased R&D spending on supercomputers "in pursuit of major breakthroughs."
"In the new digital economy where the computing power fuels all activities like the oil of the past, supercomputer is at the frontier of U.S.-China tech rivalry, because to out-compete is to out-compute," Ma noted.
One hundred and fifty U.S. supercomputers made it to the latest edition of the TOP500 list, up from 126 last year; there were only 134 Chinese supercomputers this year compared to 162 in 2022.
Oak Ridge's Frontier supercomputer topped the list in the rankings while China's Sunway TaihuLight – the predecessor of OceanLight – was in seventh place. Some experts noted that China may be deliberately keeping mum about its high-end supercomputers even if it has machines that rival or exceed those in the U.S to avoid unwanted attention from Washington.
Despite the U.S. curbs, China's ability to "reverse engineer" semiconductor manufacturing equipment should not be taken out of the equation, Pecht said, explaining how China could be winning the race.
Meanwhile, a major concern about China's supercomputer capacity is about the rapid advances it is making in artificial intelligence. "AI applications that require large datasets and training will allow one model to simulate a wide range of situations, processes and systems," such as in health and the military, Pecht said. China already beats the U.S. in AI research papers – both in quantity and quality, Japan's Nikkei said in a January report.
Ma echoed those sentiments, saying Beijing's supercomputing power will "significantly help China to develop AI/machine learning capabilities." With AI's ability to learn from large datasets paired with massive computer power, Beijing may find it easier to tackle some of its most difficult economic, scientific and military challenges.
In the healthcare sector, for example, Chinese scientists have been working on "otherwise unknown chemicals that can be clinically used in the future," per state media reports. The Tianhe-2 was used as a platform for drug discovery and last year, AI-based algorithms helped make the supercomputer "even smarter."
Worryingly for the United States, which has been trying to limit China's advances in military technology amid Beijing's assertive foreign policy and expansive territorial cliams, Sugon was already integrating supercomputing into potential military applications before it was blacklisted. "Sugon has publicly acknowledged a variety of military end-uses and end-users of its high-performance computers," the U.S. commerce department's Bureau of Industry and Security said at the time of the company's blacklisting.
It remains to be seen whether China will officially unveil its supposed third supercomputer in the near future, but the U.S. is already concerned. The Biden administration in June restricted exports to Shanghai Supercomputing Technology, a Sugon-backed company.
The U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security's End-user Review Committee (ERC) said the supercomputer firm was "attempting to acquire U.S.-origin items in support of China's military modernization," specifically for hypersonics research.
War analyst Anthony King wrote that data and AI "are a – maybe even the – critical intelligence function for contemporary warfare." If China is making rapid advances in supercomputing behind the scenes, that could be ominous -- especially for its neighbors and the United States.
