The National Applied Research Laboratories (NARL) on Monday unveiled the Taiwania, the most powerful supercomputer that has yet been built indigenously for publicly funded research.
Operating at peak efficiency, Taiwania can perform up to 1.33 quadrillion floating-point operations per second (petaflops) and has 3.4 petabytes of storage, NARL National Center for High-Performance Computing official Lu Hung-fu (盧鴻復) said.
When the graphics processing units’ (GPU) capacity is added to the total computing power, Taiwania’s performance increases to 1.7 petaflops, he said.
Photo: Chien Hui-ju, Taipei Times
The supercomputer consists of 630 pure central processing units (CPUs) and 64 mixed central and graphics processing units, which boast a total of 25,200 Intel cores and 256 Nvidia P100 GPU accelators, he said.
The two-year program to build the cluster cost NT$430 million (US$14.44 million), he said.
The new supercomputer is vastly superior to the Advanced Large-scale Parallel Supercluster (ALPS) — also known as Windrider — that used to be the NARL’s most powerful cluster, he said.
Taiwania has seven times the processing power of ALPS, while its energy efficiency of 4 gigaflops per watt is an order of magnitude better, the center said.
Additionally, Taiwania’s high-density design is more volume-efficient at one-third the size of ALPS, the center said.
Taiwania is the first state-owned supercomputer to perform at petascale speeds and it was built to meet the high-performance computing needs of the nation’s research institutions, center director-general Shieh Ce-kuen said.
Taiwania has a wide range of practical applications in the simulation and analysis of complex phenomena, which facilitates biomedical research, such as gene or neurological pathway mapping, Hsieh said.
Taiwania’s computing ability will allow Taiwanese neuroscientists to scale up their neurological mapping studies from fruit fly brains of 130,000 neurons to mice brains of 70 million neurons, he said.
Such research could lead to faster medical diagnoses of hereditary conditions and deepen the understanding of neurological diseases, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, he said.
Furthermore, Taiwania could be used for air pollution-related research and provide faster alerts for dangerous air quality conditions, he said.
Taiwania is scheduled to be activated today and private research groups may utilize the cluster for an hourly fee of NT$0.7, he said.
NARL is to decommission its older supercomputers ALPS, Iris and Formosa 5 by no later than September, he said.
CALL FOR SUPPORT: President William Lai called on lawmakers across party lines to ensure the livelihood of Taiwanese and that national security is protected President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday called for bipartisan support for Taiwan’s investment in self-defense capabilities at the christening and launch of two coast guard vessels at CSBC Corp, Taiwan’s (台灣國際造船) shipyard in Kaohsiung. The Taipei (台北) is the fourth and final ship of the Chiayi-class offshore patrol vessels, and the Siraya (西拉雅) is the Coast Guard Administration’s (CGA) first-ever ocean patrol vessel, the government said. The Taipei is the fourth and final ship of the Chiayi-class offshore patrol vessels with a displacement of about 4,000 tonnes, Lai said. This ship class was ordered as a result of former president Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) 2018
UKRAINE, NVIDIA: The US leader said the subject of Russia’s war had come up ‘very strongly,’ while Jenson Huang was hoping that the conversation was good Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and US President Donald Trump had differing takes following their meeting in Busan, South Korea, yesterday. Xi said that the two sides should complete follow-up work as soon as possible to deliver tangible results that would provide “peace of mind” to China, the US and the rest of the world, while Trump hailed the “great success” of the talks. The two discussed trade, including a deal to reduce tariffs slapped on China for its role in the fentanyl trade, as well as cooperation in ending the war in Ukraine, among other issues, but they did not mention
HOTEL HIRING: An official said that hoteliers could begin hiring migrant workers next year, but must adhere to a rule requiring a NT$2,000 salary hike for Taiwanese The government is to allow the hospitality industry to recruit mid-level migrant workers for housekeeping and three other lines of work after the Executive Yuan yesterday approved a proposal by the Ministry of Labor. A shortage of workers at hotels and accommodation facilities was discussed at a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee. A 2023 survey conducted by the Tourism Administration found that Taiwan’s lodging industry was short of about 6,600 housekeeping and cleaning workers, the agency said in a report to the committee. The shortage of workers in the industry is being studied, the report said. Hotel and Lodging Division Deputy Director Cheng
‘SECRETS’: While saying China would not attack during his presidency, Donald Trump declined to say how Washington would respond if Beijing were to take military action US President Donald Trump said that China would not take military action against Taiwan while he is president, as the Chinese leaders “know the consequences.” Trump made the statement during an interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes program that aired on Sunday, a few days after his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in South Korea. “He [Xi] has openly said, and his people have openly said at meetings, ‘we would never do anything while President Trump is president,’ because they know the consequences,” Trump said in the interview. However, he repeatedly declined to say exactly how Washington would respond in
RSS