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World’s fastest supercomputer unveiled in China
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoSee also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843248 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843248 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1841807 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1841807
- hugh3 16y agoSince neither of those has any comments yet, I'm prepared to declare this the official thread.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoThere's another one here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1844338 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1844338
- futuremint 16y ago"Car design"? So that means when they start selling Cherry Motors cars over here they might meet federal safety standards on the first try?
- hugh3 16y agoIt's called Chery, and... no, probably not.
- futuremint 16y agoI think uses those Loongson MIPS processors. Edit: According to the PCMag article they're Xeon processors.
- tseabrooks 16y agoOne of the articles mentioned they may try to move THIS machine over to the Chinese made processors in the future.
- futuremint 16y agoYeah, I just finished the Business Week article which also stated that the interconnects are currently a Chinese design.
- oiuhjygtfghjnmk 16y agoAnybody can go out and buy 10,000 CPUs/GPUS and put them in a box - the interconnects are the clever part.
- hugh3 16y agoWhile this will probably cause a certain amount of hand-wringing in the US, it's nothing to be too concerned about. The bragging rights for "World's Fastest Computer" are pretty cheap, even cheaper than the bragging rights for "World's Tallest Building", so you can expect 'em both to be fought over by secondary countries with something to prove. All I know about supercomputers based on GPUs is that they're very cheap, very theoretically fast, and very hard to program for effectively. Any experts in here who can enlighten us?
- futuremint 16y agoI can't enlighten, but one of the first questions in my mind was, "Ok, it can run LINPACK, but can they program it?"
- oiuhjygtfghjnmk 16y agoYou only need to be clever to program the libraries to use the massively parralel GPUs. Then any moronic theoretical physicists/geophysicist/industrial chemist can just use MPI, LINPACK,Nag to do useful work on it
- scott_s 16y agoThey're also not amenable to all problem types. If, for example, your problem requires performing relatively light computations on large amounts of data, there is not much data reuse, and you constantly require new answers, GPUs aren't a good fit [1]. One simple question to ask is: how many computations am I going to perform on each element I transfer? For example, if you're doing a matrix multiplication of NxN matrices, each element will be used in 2N computations. (I think. Someone check my mental analysis.) So, matrix multiplication is a pretty good fit. But what if you're just summing a vector of size N? Then each element will be used once. Probably not a good fit. [1] http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/papers/debs2010.pdf http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/papers/debs2010.pdf
- cabacon 16y agoThe interesting bit is that their interconnect is Chinese technology. The rest of it, not so much.
- 16y ago
- patfla 16y agoAdding GPUs seems a no-brainer in retrospect. Have top500 institutions outside China been trying this approach? Except one thing. Until recently GPUs have only done single-precision calculations. Double precisions has been added with the latest architectures but double is, I believe, still very slow. So this means that single precision results are sufficient for the top500 tests as well as the particular applications (in the Tianhe’s case: weather and oil exploration)?
- jra101 16y agoDouble precision is half the speed of single precision on the GPUs used here (GF100).
- sagarun 16y agoWhat is the operating system they run on this super computer? GNU/Linux?
- treeface 16y agoVery cool, and good on China for developing this. However, I would imagine that it matters less in the modern era of distributed computing how powerful the biggest computer is, but how powerful the biggest group of computers is. Isn't folding@home up to about 6 petaflops now?
- wmf 16y agoEven in the "modern era", most interesting apps can't run on F@H.
- joblessjunkie 16y agoIn this age of clustered, load-balanced, plain-old-computers in racks, who cares about a "supercomputer"? I'm sure Google could claim to have the largest "computer" if they wanted to, or if the definition of "supercomputer" were stretched a bit.
- LurkingGrue 16y ago"hurricane and tsunami modeling, cancer research, car design, even studying the formation of galaxies" Yeah, I only use bittorrent to download linux distros as well.
- siculars 16y agoThis list and China's place on it are both irrelevant for the following reasons: 1. Any entrant that extensively relies on GPU's for its performance should not even be on the list or at least appear with an asterisk. The "G" in GPU does not stand for general. Consequently this machine is principally applicable to specific problem sets that are designed to take advantage of the processing power provided by the GPU. 2. Primary attention in the supercomputing space has shifted focus from using pure flops as a metric to flops per watt as the primary concern. Beyond that, focus has also shifted towards interconnect technology to keep all those flops well fed with data. Just like the Chinese to be a few steps behind the thought leaders but front and center for biggest and most easily duplicated.