The supercomputer Forerunner 1 (創進一號) has officially been launched for deployment in fields that require high-performance computing, including weather forecasts, astrophysics simulations, and engineering design and simulations, the National Center for High-Performance Computing said yesterday.
The center last year began building the next-generation supercomputer at its office in Tainan to replace the Taiwania 1 (台灣杉一號), which has been retired.
Forerunner 1 features 62,496 computing cores, with an overall performance capacity of up to 3.5 petaflops and 9.2 petabytes of storage, the center said.
Photo courtesy of the National Center for High-Performance Computing
For the first time, 40 ARM architecture computing nodes have been installed in the new supercomputer, allowing users to conduct preliminary heterogeneous architecture testing as a reference for the center when it builds new supercomputers in the future, it said.
The center has built supercomputers of different architectures to cope with large-scale scientific and artificial intelligence (AI) projects, it said.
The CPU-based Forerunner 1 is suitable for various high-performance computing tasks, including weather forecasts, astrophysics simulations, molecular model simulations, and engineering design and simulation.
Taiwania 1 was built in 2017 with a performance capacity of 1.7 petaflops, center director-general Chang Chau-lyan (張朝亮) said in a statement.
“With the rapid development of global high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, the improvement of computing power is directly related to the nation’s technological competitiveness,” Chang said.
“The center will gradually establish more powerful computing infrastructure,” he said.
The center is scheduled to complete the construction of 16 petaflops of graphics processing unit-based computing power by the end of this year to meet the needs of AI-related research and application, such as large language models, Chang said.
“We are also aiming to upgrade our computing power to 200 to 300 petaflops by 2028 to further enhance Taiwan’s competitiveness in global technology research and development,” he said.
During the pilot test, Forerunner 1 demonstrated excellent performance in many fields, including astrophysics, fluid mechanics, atmospheric science, high-energy physics and materials computing, the center said.
With the use of Forerunner 1, Academia Sinica’s astrophysics research has increased its computing speed by 5.3 times, while National Chung Hsing University and National Cheng Kung University have significantly increased the scale of fluid dynamics calculations and simulations, reducing the calculation time for billion-level ultra-fine grids from several months to 40 hours, the center said.
The next-generation supercomputer has helped elevate National Taiwan University’s air-sea coupling model test efficiency, which was 80 percent higher than that conducted by Taiwania 3, the center said.
Research on quantum chemistry and materials calculations has also been significantly accelerated, it said.
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