Japan Aims To Win Exascale Race 51
dcblogs writes "In the global race to build the next generation of supercomputers — exascale — there is no guarantee the U.S. will finish first. But the stakes are high for the U.S. tech industry. Today, U.S. firms — Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Intel, in particular — dominate the global high performance computing (HPC) market. On the Top 500 list, the worldwide ranking of the most powerful supercomputers, HP now has 39% of the systems, IBM, 33%, and Cray, nearly 10%. That lopsided U.S. market share does not sit well with other countries, which are busy building their own chips, interconnects, and their own high-tech industries in the push for exascale. Europe and China are deep into effort to build exascale machines, and now so is Japan. Kimihiko Hirao, director of the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science of Japan, said Japan is prepping a system for 2020. Asked whether he sees the push to exascale as a race between nations, Hirao said yes. Will Japan try to win that race? 'I hope so,' he said. 'We are rather confident,' said Hirao, arguing that Japan has the technology and the people to achieve the goal. Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee and one of the academic leaders of the Top 500 supercomputing list, said Japan is serious and on target to deliver a system by 2020."
Japanese workers must take power! (Score:1)
Down with the capitalist emperors!
i remember something about India (Score:2)
Such races are very good for the overall development and progress of computing, as the new technologies that will be developed will eventually be used in desktops and mobile computing.
There are still challenges like the interconnects and the power draw, but IMHO these are problems that eventually will be solved.
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we're already producing useless and fictitious climate models, we don't need more advanced hardware to continue that money-wasting farce.
no big deal if Japan makes first exascale machines, the US can just buy them or lease time on them. the USA already has the most advanced HPC software
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Everyone wins, except for the tax payers.
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Even the tax pays win in the sense it's probably way cheaper than transcontenintal warfare.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
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Everyone wins, except for the tax payers.
Do you anti-tax types ever think about anything else? Money is not the point of all of this.
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This is nothing more than dick waving for nations.
Except that this is the fifth generation of Japanese computer dick waving.
Sorry, NSA already won, contest over (Score:1)
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Japan surely is able to build those systems from scratch.
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You forget the Earth Simulator, based on NECs SX-6 processor architecture and the fastest super computer in the world from 2002 to 2004.
True, but that's long been decomissioned. The K computer (current #4) was the #1 for a while and the first to beat 10PFlops. It uses home-grown SPARC chips.
While the original SPARC wasn't a Japanese invention at this point, it's just an instruction set that they have a lot of experience with since Fujitsu supplied all the highest performing SPARCs to Sun.
They were fabbed b
Any technical prowess better spent on Fukushima... (Score:1)
...from becoming a hemispheric disaster. [huffingtonpost.ca].
Even the laughable freeze-the-ground-around-it plan seems to have been hatched to mollify Olympic commission voters [cbsnews.com] who still gave Japan the 2020 games as the 'safe' choice over Istanbul and Madrid.
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The hemispheric disaster has not happened yet. But until they finish unloading reactor 4 - which won't be until end of 2014, any serious earthquake (a high probability in that area) could cause the precarious elevated rod bundles to crash down and even the best case scenarios, if that happens, are ugly.
How bad things are after that is still up for debate, but reactor 4 is a clear and present danger.
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But until they finish unloading reactor 4 - which won't be until end of 2014, any serious earthquake (a high probability in that area) could cause the precarious elevated rod bundles to crash down and even the best case scenarios, if that happens, are ugly.
Uh huh. You do realize that these fuel rods have already experienced a magnitude 9 earthquake and the "crash down" didn't happen? The "precarious elevation" is not that precarious.
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Farily small. 60663.20 Peta FLOPS [bitcoinwatch.com] (60 exaflops) at my time of clicking if those numbers can be trusted (likely since the network hashrate can be derived from the average speed of blocks being found) Not that bitcoin mining uses floating point units since it is brute forcing a hash... but I digress.
China is not fooling around (Score:2)
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Homegrown as in stolen?
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Waste of money (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the exascale race will turn out to be a dead end. Tightly coupled calculations simply don't scale. To effectively use even current generation supercomputers you need to scale to thousands of cores, and there just aren't very many codes that can do that. Exascale computers will require scaling to millions of cores, and I don't see that happening. For all but a handful of (mostly contrived) problems, that won't be possible.
So like it or not, we need to settle for loosely coupled codes that run mos
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"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Well you can't argue with that, but certainly a whole industry would argue with your assertion.
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I gather you're new to slashdot? Most people on here have signature quotes like that. They get added automatically to every post. It's not part of the message.
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Even weak scaling to millions of processors is incredibly hard. It also isn't always useful. If the problems you care about take too long to be practical, then trying to solve even larger problems isn't an option. And if your calculation scales nonlinearly in problem size, those larger problems would take even longer to solve, even on a bigger computer.
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How would it be a good bargain? The interconnect would be over-engineered for such a use. 1000 petascale machines will be cheaper than one exascale machine and can service those same users.
You need problems requiring time-sensitive solutions which can efficiently run on the complete system at least some percentage of the time otherwise there is no value there.
good news everyone! (Score:2)
year-round heating will be free in japan ssstarting in 2018! lizard people, rejoisss!
Bitcoin = 60 exaFLOPS (Score:3)
Power Requirements (Score:2)
Building an exascale computer is all well and good, but we still have to find a way to power the damn thing. How will we generate the necessary 1.21 jiggawatts?
Computers are ESD sensitive, after all, so lightning is right out. Perhaps a stainless steel frame would help with the flux dispersal...