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.
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
Taiwan was ranked the fourth-safest country in the world with a score of 82.9, trailing only Andorra, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in Numbeo’s Safety Index by Country report. Taiwan’s score improved by 0.1 points compared with last year’s mid-year report, which had Taiwan fourth with a score of 82.8. However, both scores were lower than in last year’s first review, when Taiwan scored 83.3, and are a long way from when Taiwan was named the second-safest country in the world in 2021, scoring 84.8. Taiwan ranked higher than Singapore in ninth with a score of 77.4 and Japan in 10th with
SECURITY RISK: If there is a conflict between China and Taiwan, ‘there would likely be significant consequences to global economic and security interests,’ it said China remains the top military and cyber threat to the US and continues to make progress on capabilities to seize Taiwan, a report by US intelligence agencies said on Tuesday. The report provides an overview of the “collective insights” of top US intelligence agencies about the security threats to the US posed by foreign nations and criminal organizations. In its Annual Threat Assessment, the agencies divided threats facing the US into two broad categories, “nonstate transnational criminals and terrorists” and “major state actors,” with China, Russia, Iran and North Korea named. Of those countries, “China presents the most comprehensive and robust military threat