8 ms·
China is now home to some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers
- jaywcjlove 9y agooh
- rwmj 9y agoDoes anyone know more about the Chinese "Sunway" chips used in the TaihuLight? The wikipedia description sounds really interesting, sort of like the old Transputer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SW26010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SW26010
- tyingq 9y agoHere's a pretty detailed write-up: http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-report-2016.pdf http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-...
- rwmj 9y agoIt looks difficult to code for (although the paper mentions they have their own parallelizing compiler & have successfully compiled several real applications).
- bhouston 9y ago3.0624 Tflop/s per node - that is impressive. And then you can fix 1024 nodes per cabinet for a peak rating of >3 Pflop/s per cabinet.
- est 9y agoDEC Alpha
- deepnotderp 9y agoApparently it's based off the DEC Alpha. A lot of the important documentation is written in Mandarin, do bear in mind. I've also heard rumors that utilization on real world workloads is very bad. (Not necessarily agreeing, just relaying hearsay).
- fwdpropaganda 9y agoWhat happened, HN? Even 3-4 years ago all you would read about China on HN is that they don't really create anything, they just copy America...
- simonh 9y agoThings change. Back then it was largely true. It still is actually IMHO for the most part but we are approaching an inflection point in the next few years.
- est 9y ago> China ... don't really create anything, they just copy America... This is what happens the best "copier" copies from the best.
- PakG1 9y agoGood artists copy; great artists steal. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/
- adventured 9y agoChina is still copying as much as they ever did. China spent almost all of the last 30 years copying developed nations to try to catch up. They're still aggressively doing it across every field, from reverse engineering Russian jet engines, to stealing IP & copying US fighter jets, to using CRISPR knowledge & technology developed in the West to try to leap frog, to the Landwind clone of the Land Rover. Their phones remain copies of what Apple and Samsung are doing; nearly all of their domestic phones run versions of Android, because they can't build their own OS yet. Copying permeates their entire economy. That isn't in fact a criticism or a negative. It makes sense for any poor or undeveloped nation - which China absolutely was until recently - to do that to attempt to rapidly improve.
- fwdpropaganda 9y agoNo no, the kind of talking point that I was sarcastically referring to was one that kept surfacing in reaction to news suggesting that China might surpass the USA in technology. Back then the HN reaction was "China just copies therefore they can't innovate". It's no the "they copy" bit that I'm talking about, it's what implication was being drawn from there. That "therefore" is a negative and in my opinion more than anything shows that American has been leading the world for so long that they can't even conceive that might not be the case at some point in the future. Even people in tech who should be paying attention dismiss it by saying "nah, they can't really innovate, they're just copying, and therefore will never surpass us". I guess time will tell.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dalu 9y agoOT: When ever I read "cyber" I think "2 guys pretending to be girls doing cybersex in a MMORPG" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- toyg 9y agoI take off my robe and wizard hat...
- kj01a 9y agoWell now I'm confused, is that not what their talking about in this article?
- stagbeetle 9y agoSelling GF, 500 gold.
- droidist2 9y agoI think of old school AOL chat rooms. "a/s/l" "wanna cyber?"
- nopinsight 9y agoMore charts and a more detailed writeup here: https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21738903-blocking-broadcoms-takeover-qualcomm-donald-trump-showed-america-worried-about https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21738903-blocking-br... This might be a key factor in the drastic rise. China is annually graduating about 8 times as many STEM degree holders as the US, as of 2016: "...In 2013, 40 percent of Chinese graduates finished a degree in STEM, over twice the share in American third level institutions." "The World Economic Forum reported that China had 4.7 million recent STEM graduates in 2016. India, another academic powerhouse, had 2.6 million new STEM graduates last year while the U.S. had 568,000." Source: The Countries With The Most STEM Graduates [Infographic] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/02/02/the-countries-with-the-most-stem-graduates-infographic/#4d9a3f35268a https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/02/02/the-co...
- adventured 9y agoThe key factor is that US cloud systems are not being included in supercomputing calculations at all. The most powerful supercomputers are Amazon's AWS or Google's systems. Alibaba's cloud systems are still tiny by comparison. Cloud compute systems are the next evolution of supercomputing. Or put a better way, the traditional supercomputers being measured, are history. It'd be like holding up 56k modem market leadership today as a sign of technological dominance.
- nopinsight 9y agoThe point of the chart is that the rise in China's tech capabilities is quite broad-based. The tagline about supercomputers is just an illustration for non-tech readers. Quantum communications and certain NLP applications/technologies are some areas that China has likely surpassed the US. These are definitely not comparable to 56k modem.
- adventured 9y agoThere's zero evidence China has surpassed the US in quantum. In fact all the evidence is that the US is leading quantum by a significant margin, from IBM to Microsoft to Google. Your NLP reference is meaninglessly vague. Traditional supercomputers, except in isolated use cases, are a thing of the past. Nearly all supercomputing work will be done in the cloud in the not very distant future, supercomputing will continue to shrink. China's use of supercomputing is because on the whole they're still a decade behind on adopting cloud computing (which is why Alibaba, their leader in the segment, has such a small business compared to the US cloud giants).
- sqdbps 9y agoThis needs to come with an asterix: profiles of the rise of the Chinese tech industry or its supposed move from "imitation to innovation” often forgo how Chinese companies are entirely protected from foreign competition in their domestic market and that the Chinese government is forcing foreign companies wanting to do business there to share intellectual property with Chinese competitors. It's a story about unsavory government behavior going unchecked not about private industry achievement.
- chrischen 9y agoAka their protectionism is doing exactly what it was intended to do.
- greatestdana 9y agoThey may be protectionist but their market is still 1.4 billion strong.
- bob_theslob646 9y agoWhat does that even mean? That is like me saying something like this: they may be 1.4 billion strong, but most me are considered unhappy and sexually frustrated by policy design. >China has many millions more men than women, a hangover of the country's one-child policy, which was overturned in 2015, though its effects will last decades more. The gender imbalance is making it hard for many men to find a partner – and the gap is likely to widen. >By 2020, it’s estimated there will be 30 million more men than women looking for a partner. In his book, The Demographic Future, American political economist Nicholas Eberstadt cites projections that by 2030, more than a quarter of Chinese men in their 30s will not have married. (http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170213-why-millions-of-chinese-men-are-staying-single http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170213-why-millions-of-ch...)
- dmix 9y agoSo 2.14% (30 million / 1.4 billion) of the males are potentially sexually(?) frustrated as monogamy is not an easy option for them, how is this relevant to the discussion exactly?
- ashleyn 9y agoMr. Robot wasn't bullshitting.
- baybal2 9y agoIt is poorly understood that the strategy in Chinese side is set to position their industry orthogonal to global economy/markets. They take upon something niche and obscure, but with great promise to give tons of offshoot tech and give breakthrough boosts to existing industry: renewable energy, batteries, rare earth metals, FPGAs, lights-off factories at scale... etc... They play quiet for few years, before quickly locking down everything when there is zero change anybody catching up to Chinese companies. Chicoms manage their economy as a single Japanese style conglomerate. See how it went with renewable, China has a lockdown on the tech,
- gourou 9y agoWhen Obama banned Intel from selling chips to China, it was assumed it would take years for them to catch up. They invested heavily in research and built their own to occupy spots #1 and #2 on TOP500. They also plan on building only ARM-based supercomputers in the future. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2908692/us-blocks-intel-from-selling-xeon-chips-to-chinese-supercomputer-projects.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2908692/us-blocks-intel-from... https://www.computerworld.com/article/3085483/high-performance-computing/china-builds-world-s-fastest-supercomputer-without-u-s-chips.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3085483/high-performan...
- jcranmer 9y agoThe measurement basis of TOP500 is effectively how good you are at solving a dense LU factorization of a matrix. This is a metric that is really easy to game, since the computation/communication ratio is very high (at least linear in problem size). What I've heard is that most of the Chinese supercomputers do really well on the LINPACK benchmark and rather much more poorly on real workloads.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoChina admits it is having trouble writing software to run on these computers. See: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1094092.shtml http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1094092.shtml The other issue, I guess, is that the west decided this was just a pissing context not worth playing. Heck, when I was in grad school (U of Utah) they would out the SGI supercomputer they had together to do world rating benchmarks and then promptly divide it afterwards into multiple computers because it wasn’t very useful in that mode. If you are simulating your nuclear explosions well enough already, the demand for ever faster super computers simply isn’t there when a cluster of GPUs will give you much better bang for the buck for newer tasks like machine learning.
- fspeech 9y agoPart of the reason is likely a lack of true demands, like the example you gave. BAT have shown that they don't lack talents to run computing infrastructure. However they probably don't have enough properly funded long term basic research projects that truly require HPC.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoHPC != super computer, and hasn’t for 10+ years now. Just like mainframes (for most tasks) have been replaced by clusters, so have super computers (for most tasks).
- netheril96 9y agoOne thing important to Chinese is that the Sunway supercomputer uses entirely China-made CPUs. While these CPUs may never outcompete Intel or ARM in a commercial market, they could be used in computers of the military, nuclear stations and other critical infrastructure. China will then be the sole country free from the threat of US mandated backdoors in CPUs.