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China suddenly has way more of the world’s most powerful computers than the US
- fspeech 9y agoChina's increase of 42 systems on Top500 is largely attributable to a single company. Chinese "internet company A" (as labelled by Top500 https://www.top500.org/site/50596 https://www.top500.org/site/50596) is presumably Alibaba, judging from its residence city of Hangzhou. It alone counts for 35 new machines on the list since June! (Click on the history tab to see the number for yourself.) I wonder if they are part of Alibaba's cloud services or for internal uses. Either way presumably Alibaba sees commercial value in owning them.
- fspeech 9y agoOn closer inspection I have to say that I am a bit confused by these rankings. It appears that Inspur (a Chinese HPC company listed as the vendor for Alibaba's systems) lists its product as rack scale servers. By that standard what is to keep any data center operator from claiming a top spot on the list? Is it because Inspur systems can be configured to run Linpack benchmark as clusters? Alibaba's published use case http://www.inspursystems.com/case-studies/alibaba/ http://www.inspursystems.com/case-studies/alibaba/ does not seem particularly floating point intensive, so the distinction seems somewhat artificial.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gresrun 9y agoIt’s also rather misleading since the majority of computing resources in the US are in “cloud” data centers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.) and they never bother to take the time to run Linpack on their clusters because making $$ is more important. I would wager Google’s compute cells alone would constitute a few dozen slots in the top 100.
- danmaz74 9y agoYes, it would be interesting to learn what are they used for.
- hoodoof 9y agoThe implication is that computing power has some inherent value, like a country should stockpile it or something.
- Retric 9y agoMuch like electricity generation, unused computing power is useless but capacity is very useful and tends to be consumed.
- hoodoof 9y agoYeah but there's no "computing race" in which countries compete to have more computing power than the next, despite the implication of articles like this that hint such a race would be important. Makes not the slightest difference who has computing power. Its relevant only if you have reason to use it, and even then might be completely pointless. Gave me 100 Cray Y-MP computers and I can't think of a damn thing to do with them. Countries are no different. Giving a country 100Mflops gives it nothing over the next country without 100Mflops. BUT what I would absolutely say is true is that politicians - those great scum suckers at the bottom of the human pyramid - are highly likely to believe that it is VERY important that a country does not get left behind in its supercomputing power. Fuckwits. This is the sort of article that would send politicians racing to spend government money on state run supercomputing facilities which do..... nothing of any REAL value.
- dingo_bat 9y agoMore interesting would be to find out what exactly they are doing with all that power.
- fspeech 9y agoIf you go down the list https://www.top500.org/list/2017/11/?page=2 https://www.top500.org/list/2017/11/?page=2, after about 100th place, many are listed as "web service providers" or "service providers" or "internet companies".
- alvis 9y agoprobably many of them are bit coin miners.
- generalizethis 9y agoBitcoin is one word, but you are definitely on point about China's mining prowess, those are asic miners, so not that super unless the figures are swarmed based.
- Kyragem 9y agoBecause China doesn't believe in God but in Science. In the US we rather subsidize churches to the tune of $70B a year than to invest in computing infrastructure.
- gscott 9y agoChurches provide services to communities far exceeding 70 billion. Trying to judge churches on what some fringe groups and politicians do is short-sighted.
- civilitty 9y agoWe're talking about the United States so that's at least a third of the electorate, one that has an over sized influence on politics due to a combination of gerrymandering and voter suppression. These aren't some "fringe groups and politicians" but the prevailing religious ideology of the party in power across all three branches of governments. The American protestant churches are to Christianity what the Society of Saint Pius X is to the Roman Catholic Church and it's a big enough group of people that it can stand judgement on its own. As for the services churches provide - the whole point of taxes is pooling capital that the government can use to more efficiently provide far better services to its constituents than any non-governmental organization can. If the churches were actually capable of providing those services beyond largely superficial displays of charity and piety, we wouldn't need government to begin with.
- gscott 9y agoIf Government was capable of this it would be great. In San Diego they are putting up 3 tents for homeless at a cost of six million dollars. Wasting money is no problem for the Government. On the otherhand the San Diego Interfaith shelter project uses 70 local churches to shelter the homeless http://interfaithshelter.org/ http://interfaithshelter.org/
- walkingolof 9y agoThat service should be provided by the government, not a privileged special interest group.
- komaromy 9y ago> China’s president Xi Jinping recently said the country is “taking a driving seat” in fighting climate change One of the only things giving me hope right now.
- PostOnce 9y agohttps://www.top500.org/green500/lists/2017/11/ https://www.top500.org/green500/lists/2017/11/ There's also a Green500 list of most performance-per-watt, i.e. greenest, most efficient computers, and Japan is the clear leader there.
- saas_co_de 9y ago> taking a driving seat That is pretty funny actually. China is planning to lead the world in electric car manufacturing, where they have some big natural advantages, which they hope will get them into a competitive position in the international automotive market. They are already leading the world on solar.
- narrator 9y agoIronic part is we denied them Nvidia chips so they built their own supercomputer chips.
- sddfd 9y agoDon't know if that is the reason, but China can build super computers without US parts now.
- gscott 9y agoChina made a huge investment in AMD a year or two ago.
- singularity2001 9y agointersting, can you order and use them for regular machine learning projects? always looking for ways to escape the nvidia monopoly.
- ino 9y agoAnd intel. read the first 3 paragraphs on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2
- lostboys67 9y agoIs this counting "black" systems or not :-) ie those run by TLA's defence etc and never avowed