Perspectives on China’s Role in Global High Performance Computing
Speaker: William Tang, PPPL
High performance computing is generally recognized to be an increasingly vital tool for accelerating progress in scientific research in the 21st Century. China’s rapid emergence in this area has been remarkable, and the current presentation will highlight associated impressions from a number of visits there by me and national colleagues over the past year. At the top of the most recent LINPACK list (November, 2011) are Japan’s Fujitsu K machine at No. 1, the Chinese supercomputers at Nos. 2 and 4, and the U.S. falling to No. 3. It is significant to note that the 2.57 petaflops performance level of the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin has passed the U.S.’s Cray XT5 system “Jaguar” at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory with 1.76 petaflops – previously the No. 1 machine in June 2010. The rapid rise of HPC hardware in China over the past decade is particularly notable since the Chinese systems, which were basically absent from the Top500 list prior to 2001, now occupy the Nos. 2 and 4 positions.
William M. Tang is the Director of the Fusion Simulation Program at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and serves on the Executive Committee for PICSciE which he helped establish during his 6-years as Associate Director. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and in October, 2005, received the Chinese Institute of Engineers-USA (CIE-USA) Distinguished Achievement Award “for his outstanding leadership in fusion research and contributions to fundamentals of plasma science. He was the Chief Scientist at PPPL from 1997 until 2009 and also played a national leadership role in the formulation and development of the DoE’s multi-disciplinary program in advanced scientific computing applications, SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing). He chaired the major DoE-SC meeting on “Scientific Grand Challenges in Fusion Energy Sciences and the Role of Computing at the Extreme Scale” (Spring, 2009).
Audience: Graduate students, faculty and technical staff
Location: 121 Lewis Library
Date/Time: 01/23/12 at 12:30 pm - 01/23/12 at 1:30 pm
Category: Colloquium
Department: PICSciE
