[Info-vax] Chinese Alpha?

[John Wallace]

On May 1, 9:55 pm, Keith Parris <keithparris_deletet... at yahoo.com>
wrote:
> Found some interesting quotes here:http://vr-zone.com/articles/chinese-high-end-cpus-are-now-in-the-game...
>
> "China saw the value and capability of Alpha, and built a number of
> Alpha systems, some of them very large for the time. It also fully
> licenced the Digital / Tru64 UNIX and related software stack, including
> getting the full source code, from Compaq after the latter bought DEC."
>
> "After over a decade of work and three generations of CPUs, Jiangnan
> Reseach Lab has shown the ShenWei (Sunway) SW-3 processor, the Chinese
> flavour of Alpha, not in a small workstation, not in a server, but in no
> less than a huge petaflop-class supercomputer machine in Jinan, Shandong
> - the Sunway BlueLight MPP."
>
> "SW3 aka SW1600 is a 16-core, 64-bit RISC processor, with each core
> looking a lot like an improved version of the 21164A EV56 Alpha core."
>
> I wonder if the Chinese got TruClusters along with Tru64.

Written by Nebosja Novakovic, a name I think I recognise from industry
comic The Inquirer? The Alpha facts in the article may well be correct
(I didn't check them all), but there's nothing I could see to really
substantiate the claims of a Chinese Alpha connection.

A different article on the same supercomputer, again by a name which
might be recognised round here (Cade Metz), says the system uses "a
new instruction set" without saying how that conclusion is reached:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/sunway_super/

Both those articles have pictures which are a subset of those at
http://laotsao.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/sunway-bluelight-mpp-%E7%A5%9E%E5%A8%81%E8%93%9D%E5%85%89/

That page appears to be a (partial?) translation of the page it links
to as "Other detail". It has lots of mentions of generic supercomputer
hardware stuff, no visible mention of Alpha, no significant mention of
software.

So I'm still looking for a *credible* source for this "it's derived
from Alpha" rumour. I can't help wondering slightly if some machine
translator has confused "it is an alpha version" with "it is a version
of Alpha", or something along those lines. That would be a laugh.

Unless I'm missing something (always possible), I'd probably be more
likely to believe something like a screen grab of a Tru64 or Linux on
Alpha boot sequence, or some other software-derived evidence, than the
generic largely hardware-independent stuff I've seen so far.

Don't forget the Chinese allegedly already have at least one builder
of IA64 systems too: Huawei (another name which should be familiar),
according to
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/04/14/huawei_inspur_itanium_servers/

Again, not saying it's not true, there are plenty of technical reasons
why it might make sense, just saying show me some real evidence (maybe
in English, or from Chinese via a trustworthy source?).