The scientist at the National University of Defense Technology of China is one of the main reasons why, in just a decade, her country has become a computing superpower.What she did?She dared to change the paradigm of supercomputer architecture.Until before 2010, the development of supercomputing was fundamentally Western, led by the United States and some European countries.But that year there was a break with the emergence of China at the top of the famous ranking of the Top500 project, which began in 1993 in Germany, with the triumph of the Chinese machine Tianhe 1A, led by the engineer Lu Yutong.Behind the development of this classification are experts from the universities of Mannheim, in Germany, and Tennessee, in the United States, in addition to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, dependent on the US Department of Energy.Its latest delivery, made at the end of 2019, revealed that of the 500 most powerful machines in the world, which is the category of number of installations per country, China predominates with 227, followed by the United States with 118;Japan with 29;France with 18;Germany with 16;the Netherlands with 15;Ireland with 14;and the United Kingdom with 11, to name the nations with more than one digit.In terms of aggregate performance or power by country, the United States was left with 37.8%, followed by China with 31.9%.The trends indicate that the North American country remains and the Asian increases.Individually, the first two are American (Summit and Sierra) and the next two are Chinese (Sunway Taihu Light and the Tianhe-2A).What happened in just a decade that explains China's jump?The answer points to Lu Yutong, an engineer at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), in her role at the helm of Tianhe supercomputer system design.In a collaborative work, Lu opted for an unprecedented and total change in the architecture of supercomputing that did not exist in the world and that today is applied in a generalized way, going from the use of central processing units (CPU) of general use to a combination of CPUs and accelerators.This is known as heterogeneous supercomputing, a combination of CPUs and graphics processing units (GPUs).This paradigm shift involved an effort in software development, libraries and data transfer optimization.The result: exponentially expanding data processing capabilities.In addition to mega performance, Tianhe reduced power consumption, system cost, and carbon footprint.Lu's history with research in this area dates back, as she has said, to her time as a high school student, when she learned of the successful development of Yinhe-1, the country's first supercomputer.She then applied to college and began her path as a computer science major.In 1983, she was a university assistant at NUDT for the compilation of software for the Yinhe-2 computer, the successor of the first, becoming an expert in writing code.She started from the basics, with programs using character-based interfaces, where any typo meant starting the job all over again.She continued climbing to the highest academic degrees of her house of studies.She was also awarded for her outstanding work for the national progress of science and technology in China in 2009 and 2014.In 2015, she was the first woman to give a speech at the International Supercomputing Conference, presiding over this instance last June, in Germany, which corresponds to the greatest recognition in supercomputing.Currently, Lu heads the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, and is director of the computing committee of the China Computer Federation.In addition, she teaches at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Sun Yat-sen University, and at the NUDT.She leads a series of high-yield and big data projects in conjunction with scientists and researchers from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and Guangdong Province itself.Her research achievements with the Tianhe-2 supercomputer have been published in international scientific journals, such as Nature, Cell and Science.But his passion, as he has said, is to put the capacity of supercomputing at the service of the population and their well-being, which is proven by a single fact: the direct users of Tianhe-2 increased from 700 to 3,600 between 2018 and 2019 , including over 500 corporate users.The key to Lu is to get a flexible and easy to use interface and the encouragement of the applications.“For Tianhe-2, we will have more users, not only numerically, but also in terms of the range of application areas.Our goal is to establish a general-purpose exascale system rather than a specialized one,” she told Asian Scientist magazine a few months ago.Among the users of Lu's supercomputer are automakers, shipbuilders, wind power generators, home appliance producers, such as Midea.The center led by Lu has developed six applications in the fields of smart cities and artificial intelligence;astronomy and geophysics;atmospheric and marine environments;biopharmaceuticals and health;aviation;high speed trains;strategic engineering and advanced manufacturing;in addition to new energies and new materials.The Chinese expert plans to double or triple the capacity of Tianhe-2 this 2020 and upgrade the entire system within five years.In the meantime, Lu Yutong took on a new global challenge: Tianhe-2 is going to process the avalanche of data that will be thrown by the world's largest radio telescope observation system, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project.It is the largest scientific project after the International Space Station and the Large Hadron Collider.SKA will begin its phase 1 in 2021, and will be made up of thousands of satellite dishes and up to a million antennas that will allow astronomers to make observations in unprecedented detail, as well as scan the sky faster than any other existing system.To understand its power, it will allow you to exceed the image resolution quality of the Hubble Space Telescope.Please log in to La Tercera to access the comments.The Garbage Interceptor 007 of the Dutch organization "The Ocean Cleanup", measures 22 meters, has six collection containers with a capacity to store up to 1,750 garbage cans.© 2022 La Tercera, digital innovation.All rights reserved.