Most Powerful Supercomputer’s Big Weakness

China’s Tianhe-2 may be the world’s fastest supercomputer, but some researchers say its use is limited by its high cost and dearth of software, according to a recent article in the South China Morning Post.

The Tianhe-2, which reaches 33.86 petaflops per second, was ranked No. 1 in the Top500 List for the third time in the row in late June. But some researchers say the system is not being used to its full potential because of its expense. Researchers have to pay the electricity costs to use the supercomputer, which can run between 400,000 to 600,000 yuan a day (between about $64,000 to about $96,500 a day), the story said.

Some critics also say the developers of the Tianhe-2 focused too much on hardware, and not enough on software, forcing researchers to write their own code to use the system, the article said. Some researchers would have to spend years or a decade to write the necessary software, said Chi Xuebin, deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Science’s Computer Network and Information Centre.

“It is at the world’s frontier in terms of calculation capacity, but the function of the supercomputer is still way behind the ones in the U.S. and Japan,” Chi told the newspaper. “It’s like a giant with a super body but without the software to support its thinking soul.”

Tinahe-2, developed by the National University of Defense Technology and housed at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong, has served 120 clients at 34 percent of its capacity, the story said. Researchers have deployed the supercomputer for railway design, earthquake simulation, astrophysics and genetic studies.

In the supercomputer’s defense, the Tianhe-2 takes just one second to do the same amount of work that 1.3 billion PCs would take one thousand years to complete, said professor Yuan Xuefeng, director of the National Supercomputer Centre, which manages Tianhe-2. “The bill might be large at first, but calculations by Tianhe-2 can drastically shorten years of experiment time,” he told the newspaper.