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> China ended up with last generate tech we are way past that point. China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect. It took China less than

> China ended up with last generate tech we are way past that point. China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect. It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer (unclassified) after US placed restrictions on related technology exports to China. China was building components for supercomputers over the past decade, they would show case a network, a small processor, cooling system etc individually. No one and I say again, NO ONE, expected they would build a full system at such a capability in such a short time.

batbomb 10y ago
Owning the fastest supercomputer in the world is mostly irrelevant these days, because the entire thing just gets partitioned into smaller chunks in actual use. It's just never in anyone's interest to run a job that utilizes all the resources. At the end of the day, most of these computers are just a pissing contest and are rarely cost effective, and are almost always a huge pain in the ass to use.
- twblalock 10y ago
  You're missing the point. The fact that they could achieve this so quickly is the impressive part.
  - Zafira 10y ago
    The political will in the West is lacking to move fast in recent decades and really support these kinds of projects. The CCP has something to prove, though, and right now they'll displace entire communities, disappear anyone who objects and destroy historic sites if that's what it takes for certain projects to get built.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      That doesn't mean this isn't impressive. What's your point?
      - oblio 10y ago
        I think his point is that there are some boundaries over which we do not go, at least not easily. Meanwhile the disregard of Chinese governments for Chinese citizens can fill volumes :)
        Daishiman 10y ago
        If you think the US government or industry haven't then it's because you've never read any history.
        oblio 10y ago
        I've read plenty and the casualties are an order of magnitude bigger on the Chinese side.
        Daishiman 10y ago
        Tens of millions versus a hundred million, what a fucking victory for humanity...
  - itchyouch 10y ago
    They are running in startup mode. Things can be done very quickly as long as red tape doesn't hinder the speed of development. With having experience building everything for everyone, it's not surprising that they can build very quickly. They have ridiculous manpower at their factories working 24/7 to make billions of phones, utilizing that type of experience to fabricate couple hundreds of thousands of chips to build a super computer can probably take a couple of months. Assembly is probably another couple months and getting the software in order is probably another couple of months. Now if it was a US gov't contract, it would probably take a decade...
    - walrus01 10y ago
      If they want to do it very inefficiently, and have near infinite sums of money to throw at it, yes. China does not have semiconductor fabs capable of producing anything close to a current generation Intel 14nm process Core i7 or Xeon CPU.
  - malchow 10y ago
    As folks have mentioned, the evolution of the Top500 shows that "world's fastest supercomputer" is no longer an EE feat: it's an infrastructure feat, and not much of one, either. If you think the Chinese military is going to be using quantum computers before the American military, then you've got my attention.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      I think that's an entirely realistic possibility. China plans to launch a satellite named QUESS to perform quantum encryption and communication experiments later this month. They also have some other quantum computing projects that seem to be going well.
- cptskippy 10y ago
  Many of them are assembled and then quickly disassembled so that their parts can be used elsewhere. That's pretty much how IBM rolls.
- neutronicus 10y ago
  Says you. I have whole-system simulations that need running.
- legulere 10y ago
  It's so irrelevant, that the US embargoed China over that.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
klodolph 10y ago
You're looking at the PR, look at the actual technology. Anyone can build a big enough supercomputer if you throw enough money at the problem. This high level of spending is getting hard to justify, however, because most of the problems you want to solve can't be solved just by throwing another order of magnitude of computing power at the problem. Building a supercomputer becomes a bit of a boondoggle, a public-relations move. But China can't build the components for those supercomputers. Nobody can build all of them, but China can't fab the processors. Search for "list of semiconductor fabs", find a table, sort by node, and then scroll down until you find a Chinese node that does something other than just churn out flash memory. You'll find SMIC with a couple 40nm or 45nm fabs. That's not just the last generation of tech, that's three generations old (14 [current] => 22 => 32 => 45). By comparison, the market is flooded with cheap 32nm Xeons being dumped from our data centers.
- jdietrich 10y ago
  TSMC have two 16nm fabs and are building a 10nm fab.
  - umanwizard 10y ago
    TSMC fabs are mostly in Taiwan, not China.
    - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
      And Taiwan would never let those fabs go to China, they have plenty of laws against that. Only oldish fab tech can be exported to the Mainland.
  - akiselev 10y ago
    Taiwan is not China. Where in China is TSMC building cutting edge semiconductor fab?
    - jdietrich 10y ago
      The Republic of China is not recognised by the UN. It is no more a state than Transnistria or South Ossetia.
narrator 10y ago
The west's critical flaw is that it believes its own propaganda. The "Washington Consensus" believed that no country could develop or resist the temptations of the "superior" culture and understanding of the western financial system and industry. That the countries that they were moving into were hopeless without their intelligence and guidance and would quickly fall in line and become dependent and helpless without their western overlords. They believed that they would always have a military advantage, that they would always get to set the rules. The financial crash, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The political transformation, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The internet liberalization, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. Now the Chinese are catching up technologically and them actually getting ahead of us which, from a socio/political perspective, is akin to negative interest rates. It's a discontinuous transformation that inverts all the equations of western thinking. Let me give you a quick example to illustrate this. Recently, I was in the pacific northwest. I was talking to a developer who was pointing at a lot that was basically a clean hole in the ground. He said that a Chinese developer was going to build a 5 story building their in two weeks and the entire structure was manufactured in China with ducts, plumbing, wiring all up to American code and all the floor units just had to be unloaded, placed with a crane and snapped together. (Look up "Broad Sustainable Building Group", among several companies in China doing this, if you want to learn more about this technology). The local developers were mystified. As if you told someone in 1990 that calling people anywhere in the world would be free over the internet. I think we're going to be seeing more and more of that: stuff coming out of China that will mystify us because we didn't invent it. The first mystifying innovation was the financial system that never crashed. The rest are coming.
- fryguy 10y ago
  Was that anything like the hotel in San Antonio? http://www.modular.org/htmlPage.aspx?HtmlPageId=400 http://www.modular.org/htmlPage.aspx?HtmlPageId=400
  - narrator 10y ago
    That was 202 working days to build a 21 story building. Broad built a 57 story building with 800 apartments at the speed of 3 floors per day: http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/broad-sustainable-building-completes-57-story-tower-building-3-floors-day.html http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/broad-sustainab... . So the same concept, but built 30x faster. The whole building is basically built at a factory and each segment is hauled in and snapped together.
walrus01 10y ago
Building the world's fastest supercomputer is a financial and construction problem, not so much engineering. Assuming we are talking about a system built out of thousands of distinct nodes. If I wanted rank #1 on the top500 list, had $900 million sitting around and wanted to build something faster, I could, by hiring some of the people responsible for building massive datacenter facilities in the US (750,000 sq ft+) with their associated cooling, generator, UPS systems, and buying several metric shitloads of 1U supermicro dual xeon systems. All of that also assumes that it's a supercomputer designed for compute tasks that can be neatly divided up into small chunks and doesn't require a totally proprietary bespoke interconnect (rather, it can use something COTS). It is a budget problem, not technical: Are you prepared to fork out the money for a hundred 200 kilowatt air conditioners all running in parallel? Do you have the real estate for them and their air handlers?
grobaru 10y ago
Are you kidding me ? Do you seriously have a clue what you are talking about ? Lets ignore that almost every company sources components from china and loses its know-how in a process. But did you actually know that Chinese research on CPU greatly benefitted from OPEN SPARC and OPEN POWER projects ? Both coming from the WEST ?
Xcelerate 10y ago
> It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer A buggy supercomputer that's down most of the time. In practice, Titan is still the world's fastest supercomputer. This isn't to say that China won't pass the US for real in supercomputing; it's just at the current moment their supercomputer is really only the best on paper. EDIT: Actually, I didn't notice that the Sunway TaihuLight became active in June. I don't much about this supercomputer, so my comment only applies to the Tianhe-2.
zerohp 10y ago
As someone who spends a lot of time studying computer architecture, I'm skeptical about this machine because of its interconnect design and memory bandwidth. It seems to be optimized specifically for LINPACK. Many people are critical of that benchmark and some labs refuse to participate in Top 500 because of it. From [1]: >However, as we know LINPACK does not tell the whole story. On the HPCG benchmark, Sunway TaihuLight reported only .371 petaflops, which is .3 percent of peak. Compare this with 0.580 petaflops on Tianhe-2 (1.1 percent of peak) and .322 petaflops on Titan (1.2 percent of peak). RIKEN’s K computer reports 0.460 HPCG performance, 4.1 percent theoretical peak. 1: https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/06/19/china-125-petaflops-sunway/ https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/06/19/china-125-petaflops-sunwa... EDIT: To be more blunt, this machine might have more PR value than scientific value.
SEJeff 10y ago
The Linpack benchmark, which is the gold standard for the top500 super computer list you're referring to, can be gamed with a shitload of GPUs. The Chinese computers you're referring to simply have an enormous amount of GPUs. These aren't generalized computers, but quite specialized one. It is quite historic on its own, but the utility isn't quite what you might expect.
- zerohp 10y ago
  A system built with the same peak flops using GPUs would actually be more useful than what they built. The Sunway TaihuLight processing elements have 64KB scratchpad, no data cache, and have less memory bandwidth than Nvidia Fermi (7 years old.) For most applications the processing elements will be so starved for data that they are just an idle waste of energy. http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-report-2016.pdf http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-...
jomamaxx 10y ago
"China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect." How laughable. Is anyone in the world using a Chinese based OS? Is anyone outside of China really even using a Chinese OS derived from American ones? Is anyone in the US really using Chinese software? Can you name any big Chinese products or services that we use in the West besides cheap commodity stuff?

batbomb 10y ago

Owning the fastest supercomputer in the world is mostly irrelevant these days, because the entire thing just gets partitioned into smaller chunks in actual use. It's just never in anyone's interest to run a job that utilizes all the resources. At the end of the day, most of these computers are just a pissing contest and are rarely cost effective, and are almost always a huge pain in the ass to use.

twblalock 10y ago
You're missing the point. The fact that they could achieve this so quickly is the impressive part.
- Zafira 10y ago
  The political will in the West is lacking to move fast in recent decades and really support these kinds of projects. The CCP has something to prove, though, and right now they'll displace entire communities, disappear anyone who objects and destroy historic sites if that's what it takes for certain projects to get built.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    That doesn't mean this isn't impressive. What's your point?
    - oblio 10y ago
      I think his point is that there are some boundaries over which we do not go, at least not easily. Meanwhile the disregard of Chinese governments for Chinese citizens can fill volumes :)
      - Daishiman 10y ago
        If you think the US government or industry haven't then it's because you've never read any history.
        oblio 10y ago
        I've read plenty and the casualties are an order of magnitude bigger on the Chinese side.
        Daishiman 10y ago
        Tens of millions versus a hundred million, what a fucking victory for humanity...
- itchyouch 10y ago
  They are running in startup mode. Things can be done very quickly as long as red tape doesn't hinder the speed of development. With having experience building everything for everyone, it's not surprising that they can build very quickly. They have ridiculous manpower at their factories working 24/7 to make billions of phones, utilizing that type of experience to fabricate couple hundreds of thousands of chips to build a super computer can probably take a couple of months. Assembly is probably another couple months and getting the software in order is probably another couple of months. Now if it was a US gov't contract, it would probably take a decade...
  - walrus01 10y ago
    If they want to do it very inefficiently, and have near infinite sums of money to throw at it, yes. China does not have semiconductor fabs capable of producing anything close to a current generation Intel 14nm process Core i7 or Xeon CPU.
- malchow 10y ago
  As folks have mentioned, the evolution of the Top500 shows that "world's fastest supercomputer" is no longer an EE feat: it's an infrastructure feat, and not much of one, either. If you think the Chinese military is going to be using quantum computers before the American military, then you've got my attention.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    I think that's an entirely realistic possibility. China plans to launch a satellite named QUESS to perform quantum encryption and communication experiments later this month. They also have some other quantum computing projects that seem to be going well.
cptskippy 10y ago
Many of them are assembled and then quickly disassembled so that their parts can be used elsewhere. That's pretty much how IBM rolls.
neutronicus 10y ago
Says you. I have whole-system simulations that need running.
legulere 10y ago
It's so irrelevant, that the US embargoed China over that.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

klodolph 10y ago

You're looking at the PR, look at the actual technology. Anyone can build a big enough supercomputer if you throw enough money at the problem. This high level of spending is getting hard to justify, however, because most of the problems you want to solve can't be solved just by throwing another order of magnitude of computing power at the problem. Building a supercomputer becomes a bit of a boondoggle, a public-relations move. But China can't build the components for those supercomputers. Nobody can build all of them, but China can't fab the processors. Search for "list of semiconductor fabs", find a table, sort by node, and then scroll down until you find a Chinese node that does something other than just churn out flash memory. You'll find SMIC with a couple 40nm or 45nm fabs. That's not just the last generation of tech, that's three generations old (14 [current] => 22 => 32 => 45). By comparison, the market is flooded with cheap 32nm Xeons being dumped from our data centers.

jdietrich 10y ago
TSMC have two 16nm fabs and are building a 10nm fab.
- umanwizard 10y ago
  TSMC fabs are mostly in Taiwan, not China.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    And Taiwan would never let those fabs go to China, they have plenty of laws against that. Only oldish fab tech can be exported to the Mainland.
- akiselev 10y ago
  Taiwan is not China. Where in China is TSMC building cutting edge semiconductor fab?
  - jdietrich 10y ago
    The Republic of China is not recognised by the UN. It is no more a state than Transnistria or South Ossetia.

narrator 10y ago

The west's critical flaw is that it believes its own propaganda. The "Washington Consensus" believed that no country could develop or resist the temptations of the "superior" culture and understanding of the western financial system and industry. That the countries that they were moving into were hopeless without their intelligence and guidance and would quickly fall in line and become dependent and helpless without their western overlords. They believed that they would always have a military advantage, that they would always get to set the rules. The financial crash, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The political transformation, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The internet liberalization, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. Now the Chinese are catching up technologically and them actually getting ahead of us which, from a socio/political perspective, is akin to negative interest rates. It's a discontinuous transformation that inverts all the equations of western thinking. Let me give you a quick example to illustrate this. Recently, I was in the pacific northwest. I was talking to a developer who was pointing at a lot that was basically a clean hole in the ground. He said that a Chinese developer was going to build a 5 story building their in two weeks and the entire structure was manufactured in China with ducts, plumbing, wiring all up to American code and all the floor units just had to be unloaded, placed with a crane and snapped together. (Look up "Broad Sustainable Building Group", among several companies in China doing this, if you want to learn more about this technology). The local developers were mystified. As if you told someone in 1990 that calling people anywhere in the world would be free over the internet. I think we're going to be seeing more and more of that: stuff coming out of China that will mystify us because we didn't invent it. The first mystifying innovation was the financial system that never crashed. The rest are coming.

fryguy 10y ago
Was that anything like the hotel in San Antonio? http://www.modular.org/htmlPage.aspx?HtmlPageId=400 http://www.modular.org/htmlPage.aspx?HtmlPageId=400
- narrator 10y ago
  That was 202 working days to build a 21 story building. Broad built a 57 story building with 800 apartments at the speed of 3 floors per day: http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/broad-sustainable-building-completes-57-story-tower-building-3-floors-day.html http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/broad-sustainab... . So the same concept, but built 30x faster. The whole building is basically built at a factory and each segment is hauled in and snapped together.

walrus01 10y ago

Building the world's fastest supercomputer is a financial and construction problem, not so much engineering. Assuming we are talking about a system built out of thousands of distinct nodes. If I wanted rank #1 on the top500 list, had $900 million sitting around and wanted to build something faster, I could, by hiring some of the people responsible for building massive datacenter facilities in the US (750,000 sq ft+) with their associated cooling, generator, UPS systems, and buying several metric shitloads of 1U supermicro dual xeon systems. All of that also assumes that it's a supercomputer designed for compute tasks that can be neatly divided up into small chunks and doesn't require a totally proprietary bespoke interconnect (rather, it can use something COTS). It is a budget problem, not technical: Are you prepared to fork out the money for a hundred 200 kilowatt air conditioners all running in parallel? Do you have the real estate for them and their air handlers?

grobaru 10y ago

Are you kidding me ? Do you seriously have a clue what you are talking about ? Lets ignore that almost every company sources components from china and loses its know-how in a process. But did you actually know that Chinese research on CPU greatly benefitted from OPEN SPARC and OPEN POWER projects ? Both coming from the WEST ?

Xcelerate 10y ago

> It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer A buggy supercomputer that's down most of the time. In practice, Titan is still the world's fastest supercomputer. This isn't to say that China won't pass the US for real in supercomputing; it's just at the current moment their supercomputer is really only the best on paper. EDIT: Actually, I didn't notice that the Sunway TaihuLight became active in June. I don't much about this supercomputer, so my comment only applies to the Tianhe-2.

zerohp 10y ago

As someone who spends a lot of time studying computer architecture, I'm skeptical about this machine because of its interconnect design and memory bandwidth. It seems to be optimized specifically for LINPACK. Many people are critical of that benchmark and some labs refuse to participate in Top 500 because of it. From [1]: >However, as we know LINPACK does not tell the whole story. On the HPCG benchmark, Sunway TaihuLight reported only .371 petaflops, which is .3 percent of peak. Compare this with 0.580 petaflops on Tianhe-2 (1.1 percent of peak) and .322 petaflops on Titan (1.2 percent of peak). RIKEN’s K computer reports 0.460 HPCG performance, 4.1 percent theoretical peak. 1: https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/06/19/china-125-petaflops-sunway/ https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/06/19/china-125-petaflops-sunwa... EDIT: To be more blunt, this machine might have more PR value than scientific value.

SEJeff 10y ago

The Linpack benchmark, which is the gold standard for the top500 super computer list you're referring to, can be gamed with a shitload of GPUs. The Chinese computers you're referring to simply have an enormous amount of GPUs. These aren't generalized computers, but quite specialized one. It is quite historic on its own, but the utility isn't quite what you might expect.

zerohp 10y ago
A system built with the same peak flops using GPUs would actually be more useful than what they built. The Sunway TaihuLight processing elements have 64KB scratchpad, no data cache, and have less memory bandwidth than Nvidia Fermi (7 years old.) For most applications the processing elements will be so starved for data that they are just an idle waste of energy. http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-report-2016.pdf http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-...

jomamaxx 10y ago

"China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect." How laughable. Is anyone in the world using a Chinese based OS? Is anyone outside of China really even using a Chinese OS derived from American ones? Is anyone in the US really using Chinese software? Can you name any big Chinese products or services that we use in the West besides cheap commodity stuff?