US supers maintain grip on Top500 list as China seemingly hides its powers

The Register ^

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A year ago, the US Department of Energy's Frontier supercomputer was the first exaflop system to grace the Top500, unseating Japan's 442 petaflop Fugaku in the process. It was heralded as a major step forward and a return to form for the US, which has long held a leadership position on the international ranking.

However, the "first" was purely a paper one. We've known since 2021 that China's Sunway Oceanlite and Tianhe-3 systems had exceeded the exaflop barrier in the Linpack benchmark. Needless to say neither of these systems has ever appeared on the Top500 ranking.

There are a few ways to look at this. One is that US trade restrictions are having their intended effect. Many of China's national supercomputing centers have found themselves on the US Entities List and are thus subject to stiffer export controls on sensitive technologies like GPUs used in HPC and AI/ML applications.

It's also worth noting that the aforementioned Oceanlite and Tianhe-3 systems aren't using chips from Intel, AMD, or Nvidia. As we understand it, they're based on homegrown chip architectures. That's not to say US restrictions haven't made things harder for Chinese supercomputer development.

Those chips are almost certainly not being fabbed in China, where the country's most advanced foundries have only just gained the ability to produce chips on a 14nm process. That means they're subject to US trade restrictions on the sale of chipmaking equipment and intellectual property that extend to foreign fabs like TSMC or Samsung Electronics.

For example, in order to have TSMC build its GPU, fabless Chinese chipmaker Biren was forced to rework its designs to comply with US limits on transfer rates that went into effect last fall. So designing its own HPC-centric chips is by no means a silver bullet.

There is also evidence to suggest China's Academy of Engineering Physics is using backchannels and shell companies to obtain US chips to build supercomputers used in war games and nuclear weapons sims.

The question becomes: What does submitting two or more Chinese exascale systems to the Top500 achieve, other than to piss off the US Commerce Department and risk even stiffer sanctions from the Biden administration?

At the end of the day, these machines are tools, tasked with all manner of HPC workloads – some for the betterment of mankind, and others for ensuring the world-ending efficacy of nuclear arsenals. The machines don't have to be listed on the Top500 to do their jobs – so the Chinese have largely gone silent.

[minnesota_bound]

What software is used on this? What can it do?
Garbage in and garbage out OS will not be able to predict the weather.

I am using Windows 10 and I have trouble with the usb mouse being ‘sticky’ even with the correct driver. It was not with Windows 7. A wired usb mouse always works.

Tried 2 different brands and 2 pc’s and other usb ports for usb mouse.
I tried a bluetooth mouse but every so often like several times this week! it stops being detected. You need a usb mouse to go thru the Settings to remove and then add back the bluetooth mouse.

These are the fixes for a microsoft mouse from microsoft so you know how screwed up they are!
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/troubleshoot-problems-with-your-microsoft-mouse-or-keyboard-5afe478d-6402-d72b-93b9-e4235fd5c4cd

Google for more: bluetooth mouse not detected windows 10
Variation for usb: usb mouse not detected windows 10

Basic tool needed to use Windows and Microsoft cannot fix this.
Maybe Windows 12 will?.... yeah right.