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."
Fastest Train and Computer are in China (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good on the Chinese (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How much stolen technology is inside? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good on the Chinese (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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]
Re:Good on the Chinese (Score:3, Insightful)
Hint: cynics don't require facts to be cynical.
Re:Worthless stunt (Score:2, Insightful)
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 sense.
But of course, computers, electronic calculators, abacus'es, and pen&paper isn't strictly neccessary. Get off my stone-garden so I can carve my calculations on it!
China lies. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How much stolen technology is inside? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 able to get a job? Whereas, if he goes into medical, he's pretty much guaranteed a very nice living.
It's not the education system; it's the market. The market here in the US is saying that engineering and science careers just aren't worth as much as others and it's saying that there are plenty of qualified and cheaper engineers overseas - all thanks to US companies moving there.
As we are seeing NOW, the Chinese and Indians no longer need American companies - they don't need IBM or whoever to come in a spend the millions setting up shop. They can do that themselves now thank you very much. End result: US based companies will be sidelined.
So kids, apply to foreign firms because US based companies have made themselves irrelevant.
And business owners, bypass the middlemen (IBM and whatnot) and buy direct from their suppliers in India and China - you'll save the costs of over paid American management and sales people.
Re:Worthless stunt (Score:3, Insightful)
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 storage (like HDFS) coupled to the distributed processing (like Hadoop), we can turn those same problems into merely cost-bound problems.
Supercomputing is passe (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Does it run Linux? (Score:1, Insightful)
You don't have to worry about kernel exploits on Windows? Also, isn't having to download random applications from the web less secure than from a package manager with signed packages?
I'm not saying don't use Windows, but security should not be your main motivation for using it.
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!!!"
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.
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
Re:Uh - China didn't "make" it, they "assembled" i (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Fastest Train and Computer are in China (Score:1, Insightful)
Japan is an island. China is not an island.
Japan is the size of Montana with the population of California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania (127M)
China is about the same size as the United States with a population four times higher.
You don't see the difference?
Re:Faster hardware than this is possible (Score:1, Insightful)
Congratulations, you've re-invented the FPGA and the systolic array.
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.