AMD to Help Power Supercomputer in China

WSJ, sub reqd | 7/28/3

[NativeNewYorker]

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said it would supply 2,000 Opteron microprocessor chips for a supercomputer project supported by the Chinese government, opening a front in the Sunnyvale, Calif., company's battle with rival chip maker Intel Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif.

The project, dubbed the Red Grid, is being developed in Beijing by the state-backed National Research Center for Intelligent Computing Systems and an associated company, Dawning Information Industry Co.

Red Grid's first product, the Dawning 4000A model, is expected to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world and the fastest in China.

An AMD spokesman said the company is investigating whether it will need U.S. government approval to export chips for the project.

[harpseal]

Ah yes the one thing we are able to sell to China without tariffs are advanced digital devices. The military implications of supercomputers are staggering. why don't we just sell them the equipment to make more ICB's, Trident submarines, Seawolf Submarines and all our encrytion while we are at it?

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

"Red Grid's first product, the Dawning 4000A model, is expected to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world and the fastest in China."

Wasn't there a movie called "Red Dawn"?

I found this article dated July 24, 2003
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200307/24/eng20030724_120904.shtml
The nation's biggest high-performance computer maker, Dawning Information Industry Co Ltd, said Wednesday that it would make the fastest supercomputer in China, which would make the country one of the world leaders in the field.

Dawning said in Beijing that it would co-operate with the National Research Centre for Intelligent Computing System and US semiconductor giant Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to develop a Red Grid programme.

The product will be named the Dawning 4000A and will have a peak speed of 10,000 giga-floating point operations per second (Gflops), slower than only those setups in the Earth Simulator Centre in Japan and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States.

The previous high ranking for a Chinese company on the world's Top 500 Supercomputer chart was 43rd, garnered by the Legend Group last year.

"The Red Grid programme marked a milestone in China's development in high-performance computing," said Shi Dinghuan, secretary general of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The Dawning 4000A will adopt cluster computing technology by integrating a collection of computers to co-operatively work as a single computing source.

A supercomputer made with cluster computing technology only costs about one-quarter of those with vector or mainframe technologies, according to Li Guojie, an academic of the Chinese Academy of Science.

The supercomputer will have more than 2,000 AMD Opteron processors.

This is the first time that a Chinese supercomputer maker uses AMD's Opteron processors, and previously the chips by AMD's arch-rival Intel are the most favoured choice.

Dawning President Li Jun said the high-performance and good compatibility between 32-bit and 64-bit computing by Opteron was a major factor in co-operating with AMD.

However, he said that all the software, mainboards and stability designs are all invented by the Chinese.

The design of the Dawning 4000A has been completed and the finished product will be delivered to customers in June.

The supercomputer will be endorsed by weather forecasts, oil exploration, research organizations and other sectors.

[harpseal]

The supercomputer will be endorsed by weather forecasts, oil exploration, research organizations and other sectors.We may be certain taht weapons research and development will be among teh sectors having a lot of time on this device.

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

"Dawning President Li Jun said the high-performance and good compatibility between 32-bit and 64-bit computing by Opteron was a major factor in co-operating with AMD.

However, he said that all the software, mainboards and stability designs are all invented by the Chinese."

Oh my!

[nightdriver]

"..why don't we just sell them the equipment to make more ICB's, Trident submarines, Seawolf Submarines and all our encrytion while we are at it?"

"We" will just as soon as we get another democRAT in the White House.

[American in Israel]

why don't we just sell them the equipment to make more ICB's, Trident submarines, Seawolf Submarines and all our encrytion while we are at it?

They are no longer in the market, Clintoon beat us to it.

[Regulator]

The supercomputer will be endorsed by weather forecasts, oil exploration, research organizations and other sectors

That's a laugh. Every computer company lists those industries as the users of "supercomputers". The truth is that they are mainly of interest to aerospace and weapons manufacturers. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) are the two mainstream examples.

It isn't like they can't buy good chips elsewhere (they can), but there isn't any point to helping them. But Jerry Sanders at AMD doesn't have any morals or loyalty so I doubt that he hesitated.

[Tribune7]

It isn't like they can't buy good chips elsewhere

If they can buy it elsewhere we should sell it to them.

Actually, the worst thing that could happen would be they develop the infrastructure to make them because we refuse to sell them.

[harpseal]

Actually, the worst thing that could happen would be they develop the infrastructure to make them because we refuse to sell them.

We have already sold them that as far as the advanced chips that give the supercomputer this high speed they do not yet have the design capability to produce them but they are working on it. further these chips going over there as a part of this project has already transfered the additional technology they will need to no longer need to make these US purchases.

[harpseal]

It isn't like they can't buy good chips elsewhere (they can),...

Actually when it comes to this type of chip they are usually subject to export controls.

... but there isn't any point to helping them.

On this we are in total agreement. The transfer of technology from AMD to China is occuring as a part of this deal.

But Jerry Sanders at AMD doesn't have any morals or loyalty so I doubt that he hesitated.

I hear you.

[af_vet_rr]

Ah yes the one thing we are able to sell to China without tariffs are advanced digital devices. The military implications of supercomputers are staggering. why don't we just sell them the equipment to make more ICB's, Trident submarines, Seawolf Submarines and all our encrytion while we are at it?

Actually much of our electronics are either made in Asia or Europe. This goes back to the "buy American" stuff that the Pentagon is fighting. There is no easy way to get around the fact that much of what we use in everyday electronics are made overseas.

I know that some AMD chips are made in Texas, as well as Motorola and Intel, but most are made in Europe (German) and Taiwan/Hong Kong. It's ironic (in light of what their execs said last week) that IBM is making their next-generation CPUs for their machines and Apple's in the US. Most companies want to build their fabs overseas where it's cheaper to do business.

Kind of hard to keep China from getting access to electronics that are made a few hundred miles away from them :-/

[af_vet_rr]

Oh my!

You do know that the majority of system boards (motherboards if you prefer), as well as other major parts of most computers are made in Asia/Taiwan/China, right? You can't buy a single computer today, that does not have parts made in China. It's the way things have developed.

I would bet that %90+ of system boards and memory are made in Asia.

[tortoise]

Actually when it comes to this type of chip they are usually subject to export controls.

Not any more. These are chips that you could walk into any computer parts store and buy, and there is nothing spectacularly special about them. What, are you going to ban the export of all modern computers to China? We could, but it wouldn't even be a speed bump for them. And the really sensitive parts are the software not the hardware anyway.

Given that, I'd say go ahead and sell them the parts. Processing power is a commodity and fungible. The software isn't, but then you don't see the DoD weapon labs offering to sell their software either.

I would also point out that the vast majority of our state-of-the-art weapon systems run on very slow processors, circa 1990-1995 embedded CPUs in most cases. Military weapons simply don't need that much crunch to do their jobs well. For example, we hit the material limits for guided missile systems somewhere around the processing requirements of a 486-type processor. Some of our next-gen systems that aren't even deployed yet run on processors that were obsolete a decade ago.

Not selling them these chips to "not help them" is roughly equivalent to not selling them American cars to "not help them". It is an exercise that doesn't slow down the Chinese a bit (therefore generating no benefit to us), while hurting our economy at the same time. That's a loser any way you slice it.

[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

"...all invented by the Chinese"

That's what I found amusing. Algore (who invented the internet) would fit right in over there.
Maybe we can outsource him to the PRN. Plus, he drinks a lot ice tea!

[LonghornFreeper]

It is not that the weapons themselves need advanced computers, it is that they are very useful for designing the weapons in the first place. I am an Aerospace Engineering major at UT Austin, and we have four huge, powerful mainframe computers just for undergrad work and research. The Pickle Research campus, where the heavy grad level research is done, and the actual aerospace companies all use supercomputers. That is why the Chinese actually want these, not for oil exploration, weather, etc., but for crunching the massive matrices and equations used for modern aircraft design programs.

[Reaganwuzthebest]

An AMD spokesman said the company is investigating whether it will need U.S. government approval to export chips for the project.

Well gee I hope so. Last I knew China was a communist country and no matter how friendly they appear cannot be trusted. Just about all advanced technology they receive will find its use in military applications if the past is any guide.

[af_vet_rr]

I'm sure you realize this, but many don't - those systems/CPUs that we consider slow, when thrown into a beowulf-type cluster of machines, are quite powerful.

The Chinese have had the ability and have been building what are basically supercomputers for years, the only difference between building one out of Opterons and building one out of XPs or P3s or P4s, is it cuts the number of processors they need way down.

Some of our best technology goes into China everyday through Hong Kong and Taiwan.

AMD is just going through the formalties, but the facts are the Chinese can make whatever supercomputers they need, it's just a matter whether they use a large number of P3s/P4s/Xeons/XPs that they already have plenty of, or use a smaller number of Opterons or Itaniums.