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| The United States has regained a coveted speed crown in computing with a powerful new supercomputer in Tennessee, a milestone for the technology that plays a major role in science, medicine and other fields. |
| 田纳西州一台功能强大的新型超级计算机让美国在计算速度上重新夺回了令人艳羡的世界第一，对于这项在科学、医学和其他领域发挥重大作用的技术来说，这是一大里程碑。 |
| Frontier, the name of the massive machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was declared on Monday to be the first to demonstrate performance of one quintillion operations per second — a billion billion calculations — in a set of standard tests used by researchers to rank supercomputers. The U.S. Department of Energy several years ago pledged $1.8 billion to build three systems with that “exascale” performance, as scientists call it. |
| 这台位于橡树岭国家实验室的巨型计算机名为“前沿”，该实验室周一宣布，在研究人员用于对超级计算机进行排名的一组标准测试中，它成为了首台取得每秒百亿亿次运算性能的计算机。几年前，美国能源部承诺投入18亿美元，打造三个具有科学家所谓“百亿亿次级”性能的系统。 |
| But the crown has a caveat. Some experts believe that Frontier has been beaten in the exascale race by two systems in China. Operators of those systems have not submitted test results for evaluation by scientists who oversee the so-called Top500 ranking. Experts said they suspected that tensions between the United States and China may be the reason the Chinese have not submitted the test results. |
| 但伴随世界第一而来的，还有一个警告。一些专家认为，在百亿亿次级计算的竞争中，“前沿”比不上中国的两个计算机系统，后者的运营商还没有提交测试结果，供监督“500强排名”的科学家评估。专家们表示，他们怀疑美中之间的紧张关系可能是中国没有提交测试结果的原因。 |
| “There are rumors China has something,” said Jack Dongarra, a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee who helps lead the Top500 effort. “There is nothing official.” |
| “传言说中国是有些东西的，”田纳西大学计算机科学的杰出教授杰克·唐加拉说，他帮助领导500强排名的评选工作。“就是没有官方的说法。” |
| Supercomputers have long been a flash point in international competition. The room-size machines were first built for cracking codes and designing weapons, but now also play major roles in developing vaccines, testing car designs and modeling climate change. |
| 长期以来，超级计算机一直是国际竞争的焦点。这种房间大小的计算机最初被用来破解密码和设计武器，但如今也在疫苗研发、测试汽车设计和模拟气候变化方面发挥着重要作用。 |
| The field was dominated by U.S. technology for decades, but China has become a dominant force. A system there called Sunway TaihuLight was ranked the world’s fastest from 2016 to 2018. China accounted for 173 systems on the latest Top500 list, compared with 126 machines in the United States. |
| 几十年来，美国技术一直主导着该领域，但中国现已成为一股主导力量。2016年至2018年，“神威·太湖之光”系统的运算速度被评为世界第一。在最新的500强排名中，中国占到137台，美国则有126台上榜。 |
| Japan has been a smaller but still potent contender. A system called Fugaku, in Kobe, took the No. 1 spot in June 2020, displacing an IBM system at Oak Ridge. |
| 日本上榜数量较少，但仍是强有力的竞争者。2020年6月，神户的“富岳”系统取代了橡树岭国家实验室的IBM系统，跃居榜首。 |
| Frontier gives that top position back to the lab. The system, built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise using two kinds of chips from Advanced Micro Devices, was more than twice as fast as Fugaku in the tests used by the Top500 organization. |
| “前沿”让该实验室重回榜首位置。这一系统由慧与科技研发，使用了两种来自超微半导体公司的芯片，在500强评选组织的测试中，其运算速度是“富岳”的两倍多。 |
| “It is a proud moment for our nation,” said Thomas Zacharia, director of Oak Ridge, at an online briefing from an industry event in Germany. “It reminds us we can still go after something that is bigger than us.” |
| “这是我国的荣耀时刻，”橡树岭国家实验室负责人托马斯·扎卡里亚在德国一个行业活动的线上简报会上说。“它在提醒大家，我们仍可以追求超越我们自身的东西。” |
| Building the system, composed of 74 cabinets that each weighs 8,000 pounds, was made more difficult by the pandemic and problems obtaining components in the supply chain crisis, Mr. Zacharia said. But he predicted that Frontier would swiftly have a major impact in studying the impact of Covid and aiding the transition to cleaner energy sources, for example. |
| 扎卡里亚表示，该系统由74个机柜组成，每个机柜重达3600公斤，由于疫情和供应链危机导致的零部件获取问题，打造这个系统变得更加困难。但他预测，“前沿”很快就能在研究新冠影响和帮助过渡到更清洁能源等方面发挥重大作用。 |
| Chinese researchers used to participate in the ranking process. But the country has adopted a lower profile in promoting its supercomputer progress as the United States has taken a series of steps to slow China’s technology advances — including by making it harder for some Chinese companies to acquire the foreign chips that can be used to make supercomputers. |
| 中国研究人员以往也曾参与该评选。但由于美国采取了一系列措施来限制中国技术的进步，包括让一些中国企业更难获得可用于制造超级计算机的外国芯片，中国对超级计算机技术进步的宣传变得更加低调。 |
| But China has been making significant progress in designing its own microprocessors, a key to advances in supercomputers. David Kahaner, an authority in the field who heads the Asian Technology Information Program, reported details last year of two exascale-class supercomputers that he said use Chinese chip technology. |
| 但中国在国产微处理器的设计上已经取得了重大进展，这是超级计算机升级的关键。该领域的权威、亚洲科技资讯公司负责人戴维·卡汉纳去年就曾经描述过中国两台百亿亿级超级计算机的细节，称它们都使用了自己的芯片技术。 |
| One is a successor to the earlier Sunway machine, called OceanLight, according to a presentation Mr. Kahaner shared at a technical conference. The other machine, Tianhe-3, succeeds a system called Tianhe-1A that in 2010 became the first Chinese machine to take a No. 1 spot on the Top500 list. |
| 根据卡汉纳在一次技术会议上分享的演示，其中一台是早期“神威”超级计算机的迭代，名为“海洋之光”。另一台“天河三号”则是“天河-1A”的迭代，后者在2010年成为了中国首台位居500强榜首的超级计算机。 |
| More evidence that China broke the exascale barrier emerged in November, when a group of 14 Chinese researchers won a prestigious award from the Association for Computing Machinery, the Gordon Bell Prize, for simulating a quantum computing circuit on the new Sunway system running at exascale speeds. The calculating job, estimated to take 10,000 years on Oak Ridge’s fastest prior supercomputer, took 304 seconds on the Chinese system, the researchers reported in a technical paper. |
| 去年11月就有更多证据表明，中国突破了百亿亿次级计算的障碍，当时14名中国研究人员获得了国际计算机协会颁发的声名显赫的戈登贝尔奖，表彰他们在新的“神威”系统上以百亿亿次级的计算速度进行了量子电路模拟。研究人员在一篇技术论文中报告称，橡树岭国家实验室此前最快的超级计算机完成这种运算估计需要一万年，而中国的系统仅需304秒。 |
| “They kind of let it leak that they had machines running at exascale levels,” said Steve Conway, an analyst at Hyperion Research. “A lot of the speculation is that they didn’t want to attract more U.S. sanctions.” |
| “他们算是泄露了自己的超级计算机达到了百亿亿次级，”海伯利安研究公司的分析师史蒂夫·康威表示。“很多人的推测是，他们不希望引来美国的进一步制裁。” |
| Mr. Conway and other experts said they believed that the chips in the new Chinese machines were manufactured in Taiwan, which is true of the key chips in Frontier. China remains far behind in advanced chip-making capability, he said. |
| 康威和其他专家表示，他们认为这些中国新计算机的芯片产自台湾，“前沿”使用的关键芯片也是如此。他说，中国的先进芯片制造能力依然远远落后。 |
| The Oak Ridge machine, besides aiding scientists, could help suppliers popularize some new products. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which in 2019 purchased the supercomputer pioneer Cray, contributed networking technology called SlingShot that had a significant impact on Frontier’s performance, Mr. Zacharia said. |
| 除了助力科学研究，橡树岭国家实验室的超级计算机还能帮助供应商推广一些新产品。扎卡里亚说，慧与科技在2019年收购了超级计算机行业的先驱企业克雷公司，后者研发出“SlingShot”网络技术，对“前沿”的性能产生了重大影响。 |
| And AMD contributed not only microprocessors but also a kind of graphics processing chip that has mainly been sold for supercomputers by a rival, Nvidia. The same two AMD chips were selected for an exascale system called El Capitan that is scheduled to be installed in 2023 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. |
| 超微半导体公司不仅贡献了微处理器，还有一种图形处理芯片，此前主要被用于竞争对手英伟达的超级计算机。这两种超微半导体芯片也被百亿亿次级系统“酋长岩”选用，该系统计划于2023年安装在加州的劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室。 |
| A third exascale machine at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, using three kinds of chips from Intel, was originally scheduled for delivery in 2021. But manufacturing problems at Intel delayed that system, which is now expected later this year. |
| 伊利诺伊州阿尔贡国家实验室的第三台百亿亿次级超级计算机原计划于2021年交付，该系统使用了英特尔的三种芯片。但英特尔的制造问题导致了延误，该系统预计将在今年晚些时候推出。 |
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