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Research trend of large-scale supercomputers and applications from the TOP500 and Gordon Bell Prize

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Abstract

China is playing an increasingly important role in international supercomputing. In high-performance computing domain, there are two famous awards: The TOP500 list for the fastest 500 supercomputers in the world and the Gordon Bell Prize for the best HPC (high-performance computing) applications. China has been awarded in both TOP500 list and Gordon Bell Prize. In this paper, we review the supercomputers in the latest TOP500 list and seven Gordon Bell Prize applications to show the research trend of the large-scale supercomputers and applications. The first trend we observe is that heterogeneous architectures are widely used in the construction of supercomputing systems. The second trend is that artificial intelligence applications are expected to become one of the main stream applications of supercomputing. The third trend is that applying heterogeneous systems to complex scientific simulation applications will be more difficult.

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Correspondence to Weimin Zheng.

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Prof. Zheng obtained his B.S. degree from the Department of Automatic Control, Tsinghua University in 1970, and M.S. degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University in 1982. He was a visiting scholar at the State University of New York in Stony Brook from 1985 to 1986, and at the University of Southampton in UK from 1989 to 1991.

Prof. Zheng has long been engaged in the research of high-performance computer architecture as well as parallel algorithms and systems. He led the establishment and application of the cluster architecture of high-performance computers in China, and participated in the development of the extremely large-scale weather forecast application based on the domestic Sunway TaihuLight, which won the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2016. He has served as the director of the 863 High-performance Computer Evaluation Center. His contributions to some scientific problems and engineering techniques such as the scalability, reliability and cost-efficiency of storage systems are highly praised by both domestic and international peers, and the network storage system, disaster-tolerant system, and self-maintenance system developed by his research team are playing important roles in multiple grand projects.

Prof. Zheng was elected a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2019. He is currently a professor and a doctoral supervisor at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. Among his many awards and honors, he was the president of China Computer Federation, and he received the Beijing Excellent Teacher Award, and the title of Beijing Famous Teacher, Special Allowance of the State Council, the State Science and Technology Progress Award (one 1st and two 2nd prizes), the State Technological Invention Award (2nd prize), He Liang He Li Science and Technology Progress Award, and the first China Storage Lifetime Achievement Award. Prof. Zheng and his collaborators published more than 500 papers and more than 10 books. The course of Computer Architecture given by Prof. Zheng was selected as a quality course in Tsinghua University, and was selected as a national quality course in 2008. He is now the editor in chief of the Journal Big Data.

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Zheng, W. Research trend of large-scale supercomputers and applications from the TOP500 and Gordon Bell Prize. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 63, 171001 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-020-2861-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-020-2861-0

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