Full Details Uncovered on Chinese Tianhe-2 Supercomputer 56
An anonymous reader writes "With help from a draft report (PDF) from Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jack Dongarra, who also spearheads the process of verifying the top of the pack supercomputer, we get a detailed look at China's Tianhe-2 system. As noted previously, the system will be housed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou and has been aimed at providing an open platform for research and education and to provide a high performance computing service for southern China. From Jack's details: '... was sent results showing a run of HPL benchmark using 14,336 nodes, that run was made using 50 GB of the memory of each node and achieved 30.65 petaflops out of a theoretical peak of 49.19 petaflops, or an efficiency of 62.3% of theoretical peak performance taking a little over 5 hours to complete.The fastest result shown was using 90% of the machine. They are expecting to make improvements and increase the number of nodes used in the test.'"
The problem with a Chinese supercomputer (Score:5, Funny)
Half an hour after you get the results, you have to run the simulation all over again.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
vegetables inferior to a good steak (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
did you catch that news where a breast feeding vegan mother was sentenced to jail because her infant died due to malnutrition?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
and how about the news where two vegan parents were sent to jail when their baby died from malnutrition because they just fed the poor infant plant matter.
Babies need protein, lots of it. They need meat. Feeding a baby only soy protein or bean protein is child abuse. Humans are designed to eat and digest meat.
A breast feeding mother needs to increase her protein intake. Even mountain and lowland gorillas, whose diet is entirely vegetarian, consume more protein than we do.
So meat is not murder, without it,
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
There is an extreme difference between first world vegans who refuse to step outside of their diet ever and do not practice time honored tradition and read the "science reports' and buy shit food from American companies.
And real Veganism. Or diets simply light on meat but supplemented with other sources of protein and fat. 1 out of 100 "Vegans" I have ever met even know anything realistic and pragmatic about their diets. That means 99 % of them are idiots killing themselves just as bad as Big Mac Lovers.
P.S
Re: (Score:2)
Further if you ever had to survive like a hunter gatherer. On the move. You eat whatever it is you see thats within arms reach while moving. Grabbing the low hanging fruit as you go so to speak. Or stopping for a moment if you see a particularly good food source. Meaning those were varied diets as well that depended on environment and instinct - tradition - following what you were taught.
Re: (Score:2)
Another layer deep. The Buddhist monks live an extremely minimalistic and conservative lifestyle. And the diets they have would not work for most of the other people in the society. If your sitting around meditating and praying all day you are likely much more able to subsist on vegetable broth and whatever the common folk bring to you. That might have something to do with your 30% of India is vegetarian. I have listened to monks speak about their diets and the differences between theirs and the peoples of
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't think that Buddhism was that big a religion in India. Never the less, Hinduism also strongly encourages vegetarian slanted diet. It's somewhat institutional but I'm rather surprised to see a figure as low as 30%.
Re: (Score:2)
The monks I listened to which were native to the region. I'm not going to say India specifically (you are absolutely correct). Talked about how commoners or peasants would eat fish and other non-approved foods. Not sure what the other specifics were. Mostly seafood was the big gripe they had. But they said things like. It is ok for common man not speaking divine spiritual enlightenment to eat meat. That polluting their bodies would not hinder their lives because the food was more about cleansing the soul pr
Re: (Score:2)
*seeking not speaking =/
Re: (Score:2)
It's true that humans are designed to eat and digest meat. It's also true that humans are not only carnivores, and if you carefully analyse the nutrients of edible stuff from animal to plants it's often the plant sources that are better choices.
It's interesting to compare the nutritional content of a typical McDonald's meal and peanuts for example. Peanuts win in every way, with something like double the protein - and they cost less. Fish is also a great source of excellent nutrients. Of course the fast foo
Re: (Score:2)
Babies need protein, lots of it. They need meat. Feeding a baby only soy protein or bean protein is child abuse. Humans are designed to eat and digest meat. A breast feeding mother needs to increase her protein intake. Even mountain and lowland gorillas, whose diet is entirely vegetarian, consume more protein than we do.
Not exactly - babies need a balanced diet containing quite a lot more fat than an adult diet, and it is in fact possible to overfeed them with protein.
I can't imagine where you get your ideas from. Humans are certainly not designed to eat meat - we are omnivores, and although we can eat meat, we also need plant material. People in the West, whether they are mothers or not, are already eating far too much meat, especially red meat, which is known to be a major factor in diseases like bowel cancer.
I think you
Re: (Score:1)
Modern science says vegetarianism is at least as good as a carnivore diet.
Bull!
(sorry couldn't resist)
The interesting details. (Score:5, Informative)
The machine uses a mixture of Xeons and Xeon Phi's communicating over PCIe, and the nodes seem to communicate over a home-grown chipset hanging off the PCIe bus. The efficiency number (65%) while not stellar is typical of such machines (i.e. about the same as Titan.
It would seem therefore that the interconnect is competitive, or at least not restrictive. Given how close it is to Titan, I would not be surprised if the lack of efficiency comes from the relative pain of using fast co-processors which lack decent single threaded speed or memory.
Anyway, it sll seems respectable enough, though I was hoping it would be a bit more interesting and use the Longsoon variant they've been trying to build a supercomputer out of.
Re:The interesting details. (Score:4, Funny)
) ... because I hate forgetting to close brackets and slashdot spoiled the joke by not allowing a single close bracket on the grounds of lameness.
They're chicken. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's sad that they didn't use their MIPS stuff for this. Their latest chips look really nice.
You mean... this? [wikipedia.org] On 65 nm tech and 1 GHz clock? I guess they'll use it when getting to at least 32 nm.
Re: (Score:2)
There are trade restrictions on the export of advanced lithography machine tools to China. It will always be two process generations behind until the Chinese develop their own lithography tech.
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's made in the US. Soon, you will be a second-world nation, and China will be a services-orientated economy...
Re: (Score:2)
Except for the fact that all of the tech inside of it is US-originated, sure.
Re: (Score:2)
Originated, get that, like all of the tech YOU have is English originated, like, they don't need you anymore, just like you didn't need us!
You just validated my point, plus, you ain't the Lord of anything, either. ;-)
Re: (Score:3)
Im not trying to make this an us vs them thing. Its just absurd to claim that the US is declining into irrelevancy when a lot of the top tech in the world comes from the US...Intel, AMD, nVidia, Google, Microsoft, Apple-- these are all US companies.
Again, this isnt intended to be a knock on anyone, but the reality is that China's home-grown processors are about 4 generations behind what Intel is doing and about 3 behind AMD. "They" seem to "need" US tech as evidenced by the fact that the Tianhe-2 is built
How does this compare with current supercomputers? (Score:2)
Inquiring minds want to know.
Re: (Score:3)
30.65 petaflops is about double the 17.6 petaflops of the current top performer on the TOP 500 list [top500.org].
Of course, the devil will be in the details. It is easy to deliver high peak scores in supercomputing, and more difficult to hit high average scores. Also, the current list is from November, and it is possible that the American supercomputers are newer / faster / better too.
but... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
Supercomputers are basically useless (Score:2)
Except for a few very specialized applications like weather prediction and nuclear bomb simulations. This is a political "mine is bigger" statement by people that do not get it.
More spam (Score:2)
What is in a name? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Time for a Stuxnet for Tianhe? (Score:1)