China develops supercomputer that can simulate human thinking

A team of Chinese scientists has developed a new supercomputer so fast that it can successfully run artificial intelligence models as complex as the human brain.

The Sunway supercomputer uses many advanced technologies.

The researchers used Sunway to train an AI model called bagualu with 174 trillion parameters, equivalent to the number of synapses (synapses) in the brain. Potential applications include self-driving cars and facial recognition, natural language processing, computer vision, life sciences, and chemistry. The team announced the results at the International Conference Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming 2022, organized by the American Computer Association. This achievement puts the latest generation Sunway supercomputer on par with Frontier, the latest machine built by the US Department of Energy and the most powerful supercomputer in the world today.

The Sunway supercomputer has a processing speed of one billion billion tasks per second and includes more than 37 million CPU cores, 4 times more than Frontier. Sunway is like a powerful brain with 9 petabytes of memory equivalent to more than 2 million DVD quality movies and 96,000 semi-independent computer systems called nodes.

Communication between nodes occurs at a rate of more than 23 petabytes per second. One researcher said the machine's parallel computing ability simulates human thinking like when "eating while watching TV". By combining key technology such as hardware-specific internal node optimization and combined parallelism strategies at a scale never before seen, scientists are able to derive high efficiency from the model. WHO.

Similar to its predecessor Sunway TaihuLight, the new machine uses a locally produced chip to save energy and wideband. The TaihuLight supercomputer produced by the Parallel Computing Engineering and Technology Research Center in Wuxi, Jiangsu, topped the list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers from 2016 to 2018.

China has been developing three supercomputers with the ability to perform at least one billion billion calculations per second since 2016. Researchers used the Tianhe supercomputer to scan and detect Covid-19 drugs- 19. In addition, they also apply supercomputers in modeling atmospheres, earthquakes and quantum circuits.