China grabs major crown with supercomputer -Feat should drive U.S. innovation - not sabre rattling

MarketWatch ^ | Nov. 16, 2010, 12:00 a.m. EST | Therese Poletti, MarketWatch

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

By Therese Poletti, MarketWatch

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — The big news is now official. A Chinese scientific research center has developed the world’s fastest supercomputer, a title it wrestled from the United States using a combination of Silicon Valley technology and some major innovations by their own engineers.

China first heralded the performance of the system, the Tianhe-1A, in late October. But Sunday’s list of the 500 fastest machines in the world at the supercomputer industry’s annual conference in New Orleans confirmed that bragging rights have shifted from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee to Tianjin, China. In addition, another supercomputer, called Nebulae, at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, was the third fastest in the world. See latest Top500 list here.

China’s move to the top echelon of computing is not much of a surprise for those who follow high performance computing. Six months ago, these same two Chinese systems were in the top 10, in different order, but the U.S. maintained its No. 1 spot with Cray Inc.’s Jaguar machine, at Oak Ridge. Hence, fears that the U.S. might be losing a technology edge were muted.

But the anointing of the Tianhe-1A system, which in Chinese means “sky river,” or Milky Way, to such revered status is surely a kick in the pants to U.S. innovation — and a signal that China has set its sights on becoming a tech superpower as it looks beyond its core manufacturing prowess.

[Sawdring]

Wasn’t it Bill Clinton who allowed previuously embargoed super computers to be sold to China in the first place

He allowed them to be sold to Russia and somehow they ended up in Russian nuclear weapons labs. You don't want any of the testing to be done for real so you have to model it on a computer.