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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.
by 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 agoYou're missing the point. The fact that they could achieve this so quickly is the impressive part.
- Zafira 10y agoThe 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 agoThat doesn't mean this isn't impressive. What's your point?
- oblio 10y agoI 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 agoIf you think the US government or industry haven't then it's because you've never read any history.
- itchyouch 10y agoThey 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 agoIf 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 agoAs 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 agoI 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 agoMany 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 agoSays you. I have whole-system simulations that need running.
- legulere 10y agoIt's so irrelevant, that the US embargoed China over that.