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."
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?"
Re:How much stolen technology is inside? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Also that Washington Times article is way out of date.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 fact was US military research bases had slack handling protocols for classified documents. This was glaringly obvious as the cause of all the leaked secrets. However, to save their careers, the managers made Lee a scapegoat. Turns out it was common practice to take classified documents to work on at home. The only reason Lee was singled out for it was, because he was Asian.
Re:Good on the Chinese (Score:2, Interesting)
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 a chip which has a million of these tables in a 1000x1000 grid. This would allow data to flow off the edges at a result per clock cycle.... which in modern CMOS is at least 1 Ghz.
Finding applications to run on a theoretical chip isn't easy... but synthetic focus imagery comes to mind. Imagine a survey plane with an array of cameras, generating 3d imagery with a resolution of 1 centimeter in all 3 dimensions, at a speed of 1000 kph at a height of 15,000 meters, giving a swath 5 km wide.... that's 14 Gigapixels/second of final product. I believe it's feasible to do this with the bit grid chip.
Anyone want to sponsor the research? If not, I'll stick to my day job.
Re:Fastest Train and Computer are in China (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Does it run Linux? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Faster hardware than this is possible (Score:1, Interesting)
Ah, yes, here it is: the Algotronix CAL1024. My memory was fuzzy, Algotronix was purchased by Xilinx and their technology was used in the the Xilinx XC6200 and evolved no further than that. The founders later split off and created Quicksilver Technolog to refine the idea and that's the one that went bankrupt.
As I said, the idea has been done and it never went anywhere.