Posted on 06/03/2013 1:51:43 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
China has produced a supercomputer capable of 54.9 petaflops, more than twice the speed of any system in the U.S., according to a U.S. researcher who was in China last week and learned the details.
China's latest system was built with Intel chips, but includes indigenously produced Chinese technologies as well. The Chinese government spent about $290 million on it.
[ Also on InfoWorld: Supercomputers face growing resilience problems. | Keep up on the day's tech news headlines with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: Wrap Up newsletter. ]
Today, the world's fastest supercomputer is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The Cray system was running at nearly 18 petaflops, according to last November's biannual Top 500 list. That list will be updated in mid-June.
With its new supercomputer, China is raising the stakes in supercomputing for the U.S., as well as for Japan and Europe. It is showing a willingness to push for leadership in HPC and the race to develop the next generation of systems, exascale.
Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee and one of the academic leaders of the Top 500 supercomputing list, posted a detailed description late Sunday of China's latest system ( report PDF ) from his trip to China. His findings are based on a briefing at an HPC conference May 28-29 in Changsha by a Chinese official from the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT).
HPC Wire reported on the new system this weekend.
China's latest large system is the successor to its Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which won the global title as the world's fastest in November 2010. President Obama made note of China's supercomputing accomplishment in his state of the union speech in January, 2011, where he said the U.S. was facing another " Sputnik moment" in wide range of technologies.
China's latest supercomputer, called Tianhe-2 or Milkyway-2, has 32,000 multicore Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge chips, and 48,000 Xeon Phi chips, a co-processor based on Intel's MIC (Many Integrated Core) architecture.
Each Phi processor is capable of more than teraflop of speed, or one trillion floating point operations per second. A petaflop is 1,000 teraflops, or one quadrillion floating-point operations per second. An exascale system is 1,000 petaflops.
Dongarra's report suggests that China may have the leading system for some time. "The next large acquisition of a supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy will not be until 2015," he wrote.
China has been developing its own chip technology and has been mixing and matching homegrown tech with imported components. U.S. researchers believe China is heading in the direction of building a supercomputer made entirely of indigenously produced components, including chips.
The approach of combing China-built technology with American products, is evident in Tiahne-2.
"There are number of features of the Tianhe-2 that are Chinese in origin, unique and interesting," said Dongarra, in his report. These include a proprietary interconnects, and the Galaxy FT-15, a 16-core processor. He cited the "apparent reliability and scalability" of the system as well.
The system's power usage, when cooling is considered, is 24 MWs. Power is major issue in achieving exascale. Researchers could assemble, theoretically, an exascale computing system with current technology. But at a billion or so cores, it would need its own power plant to operate.
To reach exascale, HPC researchers say they need to develop processors, memory and network components that substantially reduce power use. New programming models are also being developed. The problems in achieving exascale are such that Europe, which is investing heavily in its own HPC effort, believes there is a potential to leapfrog the U.S. if breakthrough approaches are discovered to some of these problems.
U.S. researchers, as recently as last month, warned Congress that the U.S., while the undisputed leader in HPC today, is at risk of falling behind in HPC development unless it commits hundreds of millions of dollars to exascale research. But the ongoing budget dispute and sequestration is leading to a reduction in R&D spending.
China wants to produce an exascale system before 2020. The U.S., at its present effort, won't produce an exascale system until around 2025, lawmakers were told last month.
I don’t know where all this info came from but I have no reason to trust it. Would the Chinese “embellish” their specs? Would our government be “open and transparent” about our system specs? Someone refresh my memory; when did we finally acknowledge the existence of the SR-71, a plane developed in the ‘50’s?
LOL! I guess the author has no clue about classified systems we have.
Is that enough to run MS operating systems without hanging up?
I jst told my wife that China has a 54.9 petaflops computer. She said “Oh that’s to bad, but how do you have a nine tenth flop?
I guess one need a computer like this to keep track of everyone at the same time all over the world. AKA “the beast”!
JohnsDaphne looks good except it’s probably 40% antifreeze (by volume).
Add this to the cost of that cheap foreign made stuff that free traders think is such a great idea.
Yeah, better that the government tell us what's good for us to buy. Right?
But— will it run windows 8 ?
Free Traitors have absolutely ruined this country. One day they will be put on trial and, hopefully, sent to the gallows.
A protectionist trade policy wouldn't prevent you from buying Red Chinese junk and you know it. It would just make it cost the same as American made products so Americans would have jobs that paid a decent wage. But Free Traitors would rather turn America into a nation of paupers and build up the military and economic of Red China.
You don't know the first thing about trade, and, evidently, freedom. You seem to think that more government control over the economy will somehow make things better even though it never, ever does.
I am really tired of comments like yours which conflate Americans' freedom to do as they wish with their own property with the disastrous economic situation we're in now. You would do well to focus, instead, on our inflation, taxation, and regulation.
Those are the causes for the hollowing out of our domestic economy. You're just annoyed that patriotic Americans have made rational economic choices under the circumstances we find ourselves in.
We must change the circumstances; not further limit our rights. And, you'll notice, I didn't call you names [though several came to mind]. Name-calling is the first sign that someone has no informed argument behind his opinion.
I don't need the government to tell me that sending jobs and technology out of the country, putting Americans out of work, increasing the amount we pay in taxes for unemployment benefits while reducing the number of Americans paying taxes, and funding the Chinese military while our own Veterans can't find work and our own military needs to cut back, will cost me more in the long run than I would save by buying cheaper foreign made stuff.
And I don't need to see all of this to choose employing American Veterans, where possible, over strengthening the military forces of the countries they protected us from. If you want to tell our Vets "Thanks for your service, but saving 25 cents on a notebook is more important to me than you having a job or collecting the benefits you earned", go ahead. That's what you're saying every time you buy foreign made stuff, whether you want to admit it or not.
Having said all of this, I won't fault anyone for refusing to buy a UAW built car.
And what property rights have I suggested be limited? I'm talking about putting tariffs on Red Chinese property before it enters the US. Tariffs are in the Constitution and were used by the Founding Fathers to protect the American economy. Stopping Red China from flooding the country with cheap products or preventing the transfer of factories to Red China is not "government controlling the economy". I suppose the Founding Fathers with their tariffs were evil, oppressive Communists dictators and the Red Chinese rulers and their Globalist backers are free enterprise promoting liberty lovers.
Nobody buys this Free Trade nonsense anymore. The only people that promote it are maniac Globalists or sellouts hoping to make a quick buck from the impoverishment of America.
You act as if the relocations happened for no reason whatsoever -- and then, in the next statement you give the reason!
Inflation, taxation, and regulation can be easily remedied, they are just words in a book,
Then, why haven't they?
but the transfer of all those factories and technology and know-how is UNRECOVERABLE! Its an unbelievably huge loss.
Yes, it is. A totally unnecessary loss.
And its treason.
Illegal technology transfers could be considered treason in some cases, but if you are calling the investment of private money in another country treason, then you are off-the-rails crazy and obviously aren't interested in the causes of our problems.
You are evidently content to leave the bad economic atmosphere in place and just pass laws to stop American citizens from adapting to them.
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