China Makes World's Fastest Supercomputer 222
shmG writes "China has replaced the United States as the maker of the world's fastest supercomputer. A Chinese research center has made the world's faster super computer — named as Tianhe-1A, which was released at a national conference on high-performance computers (HPC) in China. Made at a cost of over $88 million, Tianhe-1A is theoretically able to do more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second (one petaflop) at peak speed. Tianhe-1A 's peak performance reaches 1.206 petaflops, and it runs at 563.1 teraflops (1,000 teraflops is equal to one petaflop) on the Linpack benchmark."
Does it run Linux? (Score:4, Funny)
But does it run (Red Flag) Linux?
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But does it run (Red Flag) Linux?
And can it run *Flash?
* run Flash without using > 50% of the CPU's
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If it runs Linux, yes
FF on Windows sucks
Uh - China didn't "make" it, they "assembled" it (Score:5, Insightful)
China: "We made the fastest super-computer!!!"
Intel and NVidia: "Uh - no you didn't, We are own all your processors!!!"
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China: "We made the fastest super-computer!!!"
Intel and NVidia: "Uh - no you didn't, We are own all your processors!!!"
The magic behind supercomputing isn't CPUs.
The real trick has always been the interconnects & the software that gets those thousands of C/GPUs talking to each other.
And don't ever forget that China is developing its own CPU.
It still sucks right now, but like with rare earth minerals, China is in this for the long haul.
Re:Uh - China didn't "make" it, they "assembled" i (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, this is spot on for massively parallel systems. The interesting thing is that China does actually make their own interconnects, but they aren't so great [theregister.co.uk]. The Tianhe-1 actually runs at 47% of the theoretical capacity. In contrast, the previous number 1 (Jaguar) runs at about 76% [tgdaily.com]. In fact, China's previous big HPC was Nebulae, which had a higher theoretical peak than Jaguar, but didn't actually perform faster because of interconnects problem.
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Good on the Chinese (Score:2)
Maybe this is the bitch-slapping the US needs to pull it's head out of it's ass, and start doing the things it needs to do to be seriously competitive again.
Meh. Who am I kidding?
Re:Good on the Chinese (Score:5, Insightful)
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Where did I use the word "government"?
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Hint: cynics don't require facts to be cynical.
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It wasn't the US gov that built the largest sky scrapers in the world, yet they were all built in the US until recently... who built them? Chrysler... Sears... etc.
Companies most certainly do need massive supercomputers. Oil companies are a good target, and Exxon happens to be the largest corp in the world.
As to using surplus supercomputers being cheaper... well supercomputers tend to be rather task specific. Additionally, since you're completely generalizing, i'd have to say you're making that up on
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"weapons simulations"
Useless, that is.
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HPC is the reason our grandkids will have a longer average lifespan.
Then why isn't ours the longest in the world? Yes, supercomputing is very important for all sorts of scientific research, including medicine, but if you want a longer average lifespan, simply make workplaces less dangerous and give all of us good health care, like the nations with longer lifespans than ours have.
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I saw an ad that says - in a menacing voice - "and now they for for us - and I thought, Isn't that exactly what is supposed to happen? The Chinese have been collecting dollars and not contributing to demand - exactly what is needed is for China to spend and put US companies to work, Well, here it is: US working for them, Intel and nvidia making some coin, paying some employees who pay some taxes, in a virtuous circle.
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Since when did supercomputers become useless? They might not be as mainstream as bygone days when supercomputers in the past were the only things that could render stuff well for cool pictures, but they have a critical need in a lot of research, especially complicated models with a ton of variables to consider. Most variables are floating point calculations so the average integer processing unit wouldn't help much.
Of course, a supercomputer won't be that great at regular integer stuff (if you want your BS
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Useless supercomputer?
I think you're on the wrong site...
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Hyperinflation sure sounds nice to most people who have large student loans.
Re:Good on the Chinese (Score:5, Funny)
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What are you suggesting?
Growing population by a factor of 5?
Decrease salaries?
Spend lots of the money on small high image projects while most of the rest of the country remain poor?
I do understand that they will eventually catch up, but in the mean time you Americans are way ahead of the average Chinese.
Re:Good on the Chinese (Score:5, Interesting)
What we really need to do is look at the state of research in this country. Also, maybe if we had a more solid economic base, one in which we solve the trade imbalance by exporting real goods rather than copyrights, we could spend more money on science and supercomputing. Oh well, in your words, "who am I kidding?"
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Yeah, maybe we can flood the Grand Canyon too (Score:2)
The 3 gorges will have nothing on us. That'll show 'em!
And if destroying the natural beauty isn't enough, I'm sure we can find some priceless pueblo or ancient burial mound, and turn it into a cooling pond for a giant nuclear plant. Take that, China!
Fastest Train and Computer are in China (Score:4, Insightful)
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And the fastest social and economic downturn is in America...coincidence?
Yeah, but this is just their firewall. Wait until you see the systems behind it.
As for the China's climb to the top, everyone hated U.S. policies were the big dog. Well, I hope those folks enjoy the ride down, cause it will not be pretty. I'd rather be on the top of the hill and hated, then be nice and shit all over.
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And the fastest social and economic downturn is in America...coincidence?
You're right! Clearly America needs a heavy dose of green tea and innards, stat!
Re:Fastest Train and Computer are in China (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh my. When have I heard this before? Oh yes, back in the 1980s when there was panic and hyperbole over Japan, Inc. overtaking the USA in everything. How did that pan out exactly? I don't see how the current situation with China is any different.
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Well for starters, look at the size of China vs. Japan...
Re:Fastest Train and Computer are in China (Score:4, Insightful)
China is way different from Japan. For starters, it has resources, and it can play the game any way it wants to. Japan could only play hardball economically. China can at any time choose to overrun Korea and Taiwan at any time if they choose to, and the only recourse would either be a hard fought conventional war, or a nuclear exchange.
China can fight dirty. Japan cannot. And China is good at fighting dirty, because they "won" two wars (Korea and Vietnam) by proxy, sending in men and materials to do what the native population couldn't. If China chose to, they could easily turn up the heat in other areas hostile to the US by sending in troops and munitions. China could hand Iran the tools to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz and there would be nothing the US could do about it except engage in another theater of war which would be unwinnable.
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Japan also did not have the level of poverty that China does.
China won't be going away, if anything changes they will have to start to focus on satisfying domestic markets. Heck thats the reason western companies want to get into the Chinese market and not just take advantage of chinese labour.
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Hmmm.... if the train was going fast enough for relativistic effects to kick in, then this would make the computer *even faster*. You, sir / ma'am, are brilliant!
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Hmmm.... if the train was going fast enough for relativistic effects to kick in, then this would make the computer *even faster*. You, sir / ma'am, are brilliant!
Actually, relativistic effects would cause the computer to run slower and slower the faster it traveled.
What if we throw it in reverse?
Computerized at last (Score:2)
Finally they will be able to computerize the national census procedures.
This may be a net positive... (Score:2)
I have a prediction (Score:2)
After observing Red Flag, Loongson, and the basic nature of Chinese hardware, I predict we're going to shortly see an "oh wait, they were lying, it's 200 teraflops of American hardware" come down the pipe.
I wouldn't mind being wrong, though.
Fastest?! (Score:5, Informative)
Oak Ridge (Jaguar):
Cores Rmax(GFlops) Rpeak(GFlops) Nmax Nhalf
224162 1759000 2331000 5474272 0
Seems faster by a good margin.
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Numbers Correction (Score:4, Informative)
The slashdot summary has the wrong numbers. The actual article which slashdot quotes is contradictory. Its starts by saying:
"Tianhe-1A has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the Linpack benchmark, making it the fastest system in China and in the world today."
and then one paragraph later it gives the same numbers as the slashdot summary.
Other articles (from other sites) are claiming theoretical peak performance of 4 Petaflops (from an Nvidia source) and sustained petaflops of 2.5.
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Blue Waters [wikipedia.org] is supposed to have a theorectical peak performance of 10 petaflops and sustained performance of 1. Personally I doubt that Tianhe-1A can sustain 2.5, I think the half petaflop number is probably more accurate.
Its easy to throw lots of CPUs together, its much harder to keep them all busy.
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So the author of the original article did about as much due diligence as the editor on /. did in publishing this article here?
How fast ? (Score:2)
From TFA: ... Tianhe-1A is theorectically able to do more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second(one petaflop) at peak speed. Tianhe-1A's peak performance reaches 1.206 petaflops...
"... Tianhe-1A has set a new performance record of 2.507 pataflops, as mesured by the Linpack benchmark
So does it do 1, 1.206 or 2.507 petaflops ?
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Depends on which currency you use? :p
China lies. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fire this reporter (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, then the article lists both Rpeak and Rmax. But the numbers quoted seem to be for Tianhe-I (#7 on the top 500 list), not Tianhe-IA (not currently listed). Wikipedia table of the top 10 [wikipedia.org]
Oh, and it gets better. The article claims that Tianhe-IA has 7,168 GPUs and 14,336 CPUs. Very strange, since the Tianhe-I has 71,680 CPU/GPU pairs.
My guess is that China doubled up their Tianhe-I computer and swapped out for newer GPUs, then named the new thing Tianhe-IA (this is pretty normal when competing for top500 spots). I'm going to go with 143,360 Xeon/M2050 pairs. Either that, or the Chinese found a way to overclock 10% of their chips into the 20+ GHz range and threw out the rest.
Supercomputing is passe (Score:3, Insightful)
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I love how using a few fancy words and writing assertively is the only thing necessary for getting a few "Insightful" mods.
You don't know what the hell you're talking about. As someone who's been living and breathing HPC for years, I can say that supercomputing is most definitely NOT passe.
It's true that supercomputers are only needed for a relatively small subset of computing problems, but that subset is pretty damned important to science. There are some problems which are just too huge to be handled wit
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Call me back in a week when you've finished loading that 400TB dataset into S3. And after you've taken an eon to crunch it all, you'll need another week to dump the results back out.
To be fair, if you're going to (have had to) wait for an eon for the processing, a week to (un-)load the data doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
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"It's OK to be ignorant about something outside of your field."
How about being ignorant about a post you allegedly read?
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Building the computer and quoting high numbers on the Linpack benchmark is a solved problem, requiring only financial means.
Actually writing efficient parallel code for many applications is definitely not a solved problem.
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Metric? (Score:2)
What metric should one use to compare supercomputers? Using the amount of floating point operations performed per second (FLOPS) comes across as a little silly, because if you just pile together a sufficient amount of standard PC's, you should be able to top it (maybe Folding@home could be considered a bigger supercomputer). Therefore, I assume that the interconnectivity (and the speed related to it) of the CPU's should have something to do with it...
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I'm fairly certain Linpack (the standard metric) requires decent connectivity if it is to scale.
Meh (Score:5, Funny)
The only reason it's so fast is because a half hour after you feed it data, it's hungry again...
Hmmm El Taco might want to check... (Score:2)
his sources. As reported on CNN from Mashable [mashable.com]:
Unveiled Wednesday at the Annual Meeting of National High Performance Computing (HPC China 2010) in Beijing, Tianhe-1A is the world's fastest supercomputer with a performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the LINPACK benchmark.
Tianhe-1A was designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China, and it is already fully operational.
To achieve the new performance record, Tianhe-1A uses 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs.
It cost $88 million; its 103 cabinets weigh 155 tons, and the entire system consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity.
Tianhe-1A ousted the previous record holder, Cray XT5 Jaguar, which is used by the U.S. National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
It is powered by 224,162 Opteron CPUs and achieves a performance record of 1.75 petaflops.
According to Nvidia, Tianhe-1A will be operated as an open access system to use for large scale scientific computations.
Just sayin...
Faster hardware than this is possible (Score:2, Interesting)
Due to the Von Neuman bottleneck, most of the transistors in a computer are in the RAM, which is idle except for the row/column being accessed at a given time. The bitgrid gets around this by building a grid of look up tables which operate on 4 bits in and 4 bits. It should be quite easy to build
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Look up "artificial retina", not the kind to restore vision to the blind, but the kind to perform computer vision tasks
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel1%2F4%2F5792%2F00222178.pdf%3Farnumber%3D222178&authDecision=-203
Very similar to what you are suggesting.
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The simplicity, uniformity, and symmetry of a bitgrid design allows for almost trivial movement of portions of a computation, which also allows it to route around hardware failure.
The systolic array is any array of computational elements each of which runs its own program.... almost any supercomputer
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Well, I may an idiot, but I think you've jumped to that conclusion prematurely. I have done quite a bit of research in this area trying to find some prior art, things got close a few times, but no cigar.
As to your claim that it's possible to do this with an existing FPGA, According to Digikey, their "biggest" Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA [digikey.com], which prices out at about $150 is capable of providing 5831 CLBs... which is less than 1% of the capability of the bitgrid chip I proposed above.
A chip devoid of specialized rou
Yawn... (Score:2)
Call me when China invents something like Tang.
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No one has yet mentioned the Tang Dynasty?
but can it surf "free Tibet?" (Score:2)
I'll bet it can't!
Actually (Score:2)
Tianhe-1A is theoretically able to do more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second (one petaflop) at peak speed. Tianhe-1A 's peak performance reaches 1.206 petaflops,
But according to the news Jaguar is able to mosey along at 1.75 petaflops, and Tianhe is rolling along at 2.5. The petaflops barrier was broken a few years ago, so Tianhe is basically a product of Moore's law.
Re:How much stolen technology is inside? (Score:5, Informative)
Stolen? I don't know. Purchased? From the article:
So unless Nvidia and Intel have reported 20,000 or so stolen processors lately, I wouldn't worry too much.
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INTEL, IBM, and other high tech firms have been sending their R&D, engineering and other high up on the job food chain jobs over there and to India. They have been building up expertise in other countries. Of course this happened.
We the US will become a technological backwater. Of course the pundits will say shit like "American kids just aren't studying science and engineering" or "It's our education system."
The answer is: why should a bright kid go into science or engineering when he won't be
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"the costs of over paid American management and sales people."
and there's the key. the U.S. is the victim of its own isolated success. All of a sudden its no longer isolated (a la The World Is Flat), and the jobs move to cheaper venues.
I did just read an article about certain aspects of Indian cost of living increasing in accordance with the shift in jobs. We just aren't worth what we say we are, and the market correction is taking a long time.
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This rings quite true, although it is slowly changing. Here in the US, you can get out of college with a fresh CS or scientific degree from a good university... and end up sitting on your duff for years waiting tables until you find something relevant. A simialr student who finishes up a generic major in college, then passes the bar exam in their state, will never see an unemployment line in their lifetime.
Until this is changed, Americans will see the cool electronic stuff only appearing in China and Indi
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http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do;jsessionid=392426F8AEF3E495934CBA3FB0007F30.node1?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+NOT+XML+V0//EN&language=EN [europa.eu]
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Oh, like this doesn't go both ways. At least they didn't start bribing/kidnapping our scientists to make "Dooms Day" devices in a hidden lair in the desert, like we did with the Germans in the Manhattan project.
Also that Washington Times article is way out of date. The proceedings of the Wen Hoo Lee trial (accused of stealing the W88 warhead for China) embarrassed public officials to the point where Bill Clinton had to issue an apology and the US government had to pay an undisclosed settlement to Lee.
The fa
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Serious research still needs much faster supercomputers than we have now. All kinds of science - from artificial intelligence to weather modeling to astrophysics to genetic research to nuclear simulations. Access to a powerful supercomputer is a major boon for academia in the country.
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Does research still need supercomputers, though? If you're writing a program parallelized enough to split across tens of thousands of processing units, why not go with a full cluster, like the vaunted Hadoop or EC2?
I think the time for a single powerful machine is long past. Maintaining the level of interconnection between the nodes is expensive, and we can do better. In the words of Dr. Ken Batcher, "A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems." With distributed s
Re:Worthless stunt (Score:4, Informative)
Nearly all of these supercomputers are just that - VERY large clusters.
Although in many cases they have specialized communications backplanes for communications between nodes with capabilities (such as low latency) that can't be achieved with geographically distributed clusters. (Note the mention of parts from Intel and Nvidia, combined with undefined "domestic" communications silicon.)
Also note that geographic distribution leads to all sorts of information assurance nightmares when you're simulating nukes...
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Yes, lots of good, interesting research still going on.
If you think clusters or Hadoop or map reduce or EC2 or cloud computing is going to solve the problems that supercomuter tackle you will be waiting around for a very long time.
"A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems."Some problems are compute bound, some are memory bound, some are I/O bound. Supercomputers attempt to addresses this for the largest of t
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And to add to that, if you are I/O bound, you are screwed anyways, and even more so with this "supercomputer", as it has an overkill of local processing power in the nodes that will easily saturate any backplane. Graphics-card based computations make only sense if you are _not_ I/O bound. But in this case a cloud is far better than one monolithic system.
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Depends on the task at hand. If something is infinitely parallizable such as a ray-trace where a screen can have subsets of pixels be handed off to other cores, CPUs, or separate discrete computers, just chucking more blades in a rack will do the job.
But not all tasks can be broken up into bits that don't depend on each other. There are tasks such as various types of modeling which require step "A" to be done before step "B" can be handed out, and even with the best of technology, if a box had 1000 cores,
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Serious research still needs much faster supercomputers than we have now. All kinds of science - from artificial intelligence to weather modeling to astrophysics to genetic research to nuclear simulations. Access to a powerful supercomputer is a major boon for academia in the country.
Whether serious research needs faster computers, is up for debate. Personally I think it mostly needs researchers that know how to program. But even if faster computers are needed, then the needed ones are not of the supercomputer type.
I hope you realize that "FLOPS" are entirely useless for AI. On the other front, these "supercomputers" give you very little "FLOP" for the buck.
It is not a boon. It is a waste of money, done in order for some people to build themselves a monument.
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Or they're using them for complex modelling - like everyone else who has one uses them for.
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If your definition of supercomputer is an old yellow box with the turbo button then yes. Otherwise you are just plain retarded.
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Watch it... he has a botnet of Atari 2600's that will DDOS your ass.
Or something.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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The battle to build the fastest supercomputer has become a sort of national pride as these high performance computers are used in a variety of areas like defense, energy, finance, science. They are also used for drug discovery, hurricane and tsunami modeling, cancer research, car design, even studying the formation of galaxies. For example, oil companies use supercomputers to find reservoirs, while Wall Street traders use it for speedy automated trades.
Everyone knows that you can do all of the above on a simple netbook
Re:Worthless stunt (Score:5, Insightful)
we went to the moon during a period of nationalist chest thumping, and when the nationalist chest thumping subsided, we haven't been back. countries that are interested in nationalist chest thumping: china, india, etc, are still pumping up their space programs
what i am saying is, for all the evils of nationalism, scientific advancement in the realm of large projects seems to be a positive byproduct
for example, if we were still in a cold war with the ussr in the 1990s, i will bet you anything that this would have been completed and would be producing amazing science at this point in time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider [wikipedia.org]
LHC (Score:2)
- what "nationalist chest thumping" went on to make the Large Hadron Collider happen?
just curious to see how this fits into your theory. I've no idea, maybe you have the answer. But the LHC seems to have got built, and not as a war time artefact (in my ignorant opinion). Seems more like a collaboration between nations.
Education on this point welcomed.....
Re:LHC (Score:4, Insightful)
all of european advancement over the last 10 centuries can be traced to tribal and then nationalist competition
french spanish and british frigates would not have been sailing around india, china and the south pacific, making military inroads, if french spanish and british galleons were not first doing their best to better shoot holes into one another
in fact, you can say china and india stagnated behind european scientific advancement precisely because there was no fever pitch nationalist rivalries in those areas
european history is exhibit number one of scientific advancement propelled forward by nationalist rivalry, hardly an example of a contrast to what i am saying
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yes, that is exactly what i am saying
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_India [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_India [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foreign_enclaves_in_China [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game [wikipedia.org]
etc
you just don't know your history very well
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Exactly, nationalist chest thumping can only help if a country wants to do something on its own. What's necessary is having abundant resources to spend on something that isn't profitable - and if many nations with these abundant resources collaborate, they can do really amazing things with their collective resources like the LHC.
America gave their abundant resources to the corporate elite and blew it on unnecessary wars and bailing out their broken financial system (Am I being redundant?).
Far from their pas
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well if its a war, lets start fighting back
implicit in your statement is that citizens are somehow helpless against corporations. hardly
don't lay down and take it, stand up and fight back, if at least only to preserve your self-respect
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As a researcher using (US&European) supercomputers for high-performance numbercrunching, I strongly disagree. Some of the calculations take so much time that if I had to run it on one single (powerfull) CPU, I could probably do one big calculation in my entire PhD... Nevermind that by the time it was finished, the hardware would be long obsolete, and its not possible to fit the data in a single computer's memory anyway. So for some tasks, large/powerfull & shared computer resources really makes sens
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There will always be problems that require large amounts of computing power. In some cases, increases in computing power make previously unworkable problems feasible to throw a computer at.
Just because today's PCs are more powerful than older supercomputers doesn't mean there is going to be demand for capabilities at the upper end of the computing power spectrum.
In this case - A large number of the top computers in the world are used for nuclear weapons simulations. (You can't test them any more due to te
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The time for "supercomputers" is long past. This is just muscle-play that does not mean anything. The fetish of having a "supercomputer" seems to be a left-over from the times when computers were very slow and almost nobody had one. Or maybe politicians (and journalists) are still living in those times...
False. 1) Protien Folding Simulations (and any number of chemical / biological simulations). 2) Prestige attracts money and brainpower.
Stunt, yes. You could make several smaller "super computers" to have equivalent output. Worthless no.
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The issue is I/O. CPU power is one thing. However, getting the data up the storage hierarchy to the CPU and back down again is where people pay the big bucks for real machines and not just fire up stacks of x86 boxes if they have some serious tasks.
This can be explained in a simple way: Build the latest Linux or BSD kernel. The time it takes to build one either has stayed the same, or actually has gotten longer than in times past (when one ran a kernel build of that time on that time's computers). Why
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Is this faster than Blue Waters at NCSA is going to be in 2011?
Nope, Blue Waters is supposed to be significantly faster. According to NCSA's page about Blue Waters [illinois.edu], Blue Waters is supposed to have peak performance of 10 petaflops, and sustained performance at 1 petaflop. Tianhe-1A, according to the summary, peaks at about 1.2 petaflops.
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Precisely. Don't forget the dam to power that baby up and its cooling equipment, the cabling and the housing.