Posted on 10/29/2010 9:09:27 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
A research lab in China has made the fastest supercomputer in the world. With this, it has been able to replace US in having the hold on this segment of technology.
But as China is trying to realize its dream of becoming the best in hi-tech, US has asked it to control its demand in rare earth elements. These elements are used in many a high-technology applications and have been in great demand by China.
To be able to get hold of these, China has been flexing its muscles for the last few months and has attracted attention especially from US.
And to be able to resolve the same, US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton is expected to talk to the Chinese leaders about the issue. She is likely to raise the point of serious decrease of the rare earth elements and may ask China to control its hunger.
A press release from the Clinton's offices has said that the rare earth elements are critical to industrial production in US and Japan.
But the Chinese office has refused to bargain on the same issue.
GENERAL SPECS
http://www.top500.org/system/10186
------------------------------------------------------------------------
System Name Tianhe-1
Site National SuperComputer Center in Tianjin/NUDT
System Family NUDT Cluster
System Model NUDT TH-1 Cluster
Computer NUDT TH-1 Cluster, Xeon E5540/E5450, ATI Radeon HD 4870 2, Infiniband
Vendor NUDT
Application area Research
Main Memory 98304 GB
Installation Year 2009
Operating System Linux
Memory 98304 GB
Interconnect Infinband DDR 4x
Processor Intel EM64T Xeon E55xx (Nehalem-EP) 2530 MHz (10.12 GFlops)
One of the few petaFLOP level supercomputers outside the United States.
As of October 2010, an upgraded version of the machine (Tianhe-1A) became the world's fastest supercomputer, performing at peak computing rate of 2.5 petaflops.
The Tianhe-I is operated as an open access system for large-scale scientific computations and uses a Linux operating system.
developed by the Chinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Changsha, Hunan. It was first revealed to the public on 29 October 2009, and was immediately ranked as the world's fifth fastest supercomputer in the TOP500 list released at the 2009 Supercomputing Conference (SC09) held in Portland, Oregon, on 16 November 2009. Tianhe achieved a speed of 563 teraflops in its first Top 500 test and had a peak performance of 1.2 petaflops. Thus at startup, the system had an efficiency of 46%.
Originally, Tianhe-I was powered by 4,096 Intel Xeon E5540 processors and 1,024 Intel Xeon E5450 processors, with 5,120 AMD GPUs which were made up of 2,560 dual-GPU ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2[not in citation given] graphics cards.[9] After the upgrade, it is equipped with 14,336 Xeon X5670 processors and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 general purpose GPUs. 2048 NUDT FT1000 heterogeneous processors are also installed in the system, but their computing power were not counted into the machine's official Linpack statistics as of October 2010.
TH-1 runs an operating system based on the Linux kernel,most likely Red Flag Linux.
The supercomputer is installed at the National Super Computer Center, Tianjin, and is used to carry out computations for petroleum exploration and aircraft simulation.
maybe instead of controlling demand, we should be looking for ways to increase supply...like I dunno...maybe eliminating government barriers to production???
We use the E55xx procs in our ProLiant servers. They’re def. workhorses. I can’t imagine the heat from this equipment. We use cold aisle containment and heat baffling up to our plenum, and we still have to keep our DC at 76.
Oh... and 98 TB of RAM? GTFO!
I definitely like the E55xx series (Nehalem) from Intel. They can crank up the work pretty quickly.
I was skeptical about Nehalem, but I’ve been proven wrong in every way possible. I’m so happy they figured a way around the bottleneck of the FSB and proc caching.
I’ve got a Nehalem board with an i7 proc in my home gaming rig, and it SCREAMS! So far nothing I’ve thrown at it makes it blink. I had 2 VMs running Win7, Battlefield Bad Company 2, MS Outlook, and Firefox running, and I was barely touching 50C on the proc temp.
Way to go Intel!
Wonder how long the global warmists will take to get their hands on one of these to further fudge data in climate science.
You beat me to it, I was about to post a similar news, but here’s the one I wanted to post
China Beats US In Supercomputer Race
http://www.timesoftheinternet.com/briefs/china-beats-us-in-supercomputer-race/
China seems to be determined to become the next superpower in the world as soon as possible, and is gaining ground in this direction fast. In a new feat, China has unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer, Tianhe-1, replacing the USA’s own Jaguar supercomputer. Tianhe-1 has a computing speed of 2.507 petaflops per second, which leaves the Jaguar far behind at 1.75 petaflops per second. This is surely a blow for the USA, which boasts of having more than half of the world’s top 500 supercomputers.
Tianhe means Milky-Way, and has always been at the forefront of China’s supercomputer lineup. It initially started off with a speed of less than 0.7 petaflops per second, and after multiple upgrades, it has finally risen to the top of the list. Tianhe-1 uses high-end Intel CPUs and nVIDIA GPUs, and is expected to be used for conducting meteorological studies and at the National Offshore Oil Corporation Data Center. Besides this, it can also be used in the animation industry to process the high-definition animation sequences that are produced these days.
China looks very confident in its approach and one can expect that the USA will be working furiously to regain the top spot. The updated list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers (with Tianhe-1 at the top) will be released in November this year.
This site :
Has not updated its Top 10 list yet. The latest list they have is June 2010.
I’m glad they solved the problems - but what if they cut a few corners by using dangerously unstable proto-matter?
Does it mean faster and cooler processors? Absolutely!
At present, the biggest challenges to higher processing speeds are transistor size and heat. They’re getting pretty damn small on the transistors, but the heat is still high.
I had to spend a few hundred bucks on liquid cooling for my home rig, but it was worth it. Directed cooling by fans isn’t effective anymore.
To ASK?
Now we are supplicants to the succubus.
Freaking outstanding.
And Clinton—of the ChiCom treachery (money, tech, tool & die eportation, etc.)—is right THERE in the middle of it AGAIN.
I bet her Blackberry syncs up just fine.
The real keys will be in a style (or form) of processing. The closest example today would be something like ASIC platforms... although I would suggest that ASIC's won't even really compare to where we end up in a few more decades. We will not be measuring speed by MHz, it will be by process completion for specific tasks. Even this will only be relevant for very specific purposes. Normal everyday PC computing reached it's threshold quite a few years ago. The normal user can't really tell the difference between a 1.4Ghz processor and 3.4Ghz on current mainstream platforms and operating systems.
Memory, BUS speeds and storage subsystems are currently the bottlenecks in high-speed computing (where there is an actual purpose beyond MIPS/bragging rights), not CPU processing.
The only folks interested in stuff like Tianhe-1 are orgs like NSA who do major encryption/decryption. I would argue that purpose-built processors (ASIC's) could do the job much better than clusters doing LAP like this any day of the week even for the NSA. The only reason they don't exist in large numbers is cost.
So, I tend to chuckle every time someone claims to now have the worlds fastest computer... they are usually nothing more than something like SETI on a massive but local scale. The only real exceptions are like IBM (just a single example) where they are truly developing new architecture that cannot be compared in MHz.
Related thread:
RE: Now we are supplicants to the succubus.
We have reached a point when we as a nation do not have the collectively will to assert ourselves at all.
We give up our technological lead, allowed the Russians under Putin to know how many nuclear weapons we have, and now, do not even DARE extract the rare earths we know we have that are plentiful at home, allowing the Chicoms to corner this market so essential to technology, because we are afraid of our environmentalist lobby.
Heck, we would even allow 40% unemployment in California’s Central valley, turning off the critical water that farmers need because we do not want to disturb the habitat of some small fish.
And more Heck, we don’t even dare drill for oil ANYWHERE anymore, preferring to idle thousands of skilled Petroleum technicians and engineers, even as China, Brazil and other countries continue to exploit theirs.
We have come a long way — DOWNWARDS from the time we proudly showed the world that we were able to land a man on the moon.
RE: Molycorp and the Minions
We have reached a point when we as a nation do not have the collectively will to assert ourselves at all.
We give up our technological lead, allowed the Russians under Putin to know how many nuclear weapons we have, and now, do not even DARE extract the rare earths we know we have that are plentiful at home, allowing the Chicoms to corner this market so essential to technology, because we are afraid of our environmentalist lobby.
Heck, we would even allow 40% unemployment in California’s Central valley, turning off the critical water that farmers need because we do not want to disturb the habitat of some small fish.
And more Heck, we don’t even dare drill for oil ANYWHERE anymore, preferring to idle thousands of skilled Petroleum technicians and engineers, even as China, Brazil and other countries continue to exploit theirs.
We have come a long way — DOWNWARDS from the time we proudly showed the world that we were able to land a man on the moon.
I suppose in the back room are a few Cray supercomputers the chicoms took apart for reverse engineering. Or Clinton just gave them the Engineering Drawings.
> Operating System Linux
Even the Chicoms love it!
A radical minority have put us in that position. We know their agenda. The majority’s main fault is not putting them down.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.