China claims supercomputer crown

what's wrong with that? you don't want other countries to do well? you want america to be the fat king and everyone else remain a poor pauper? is that your idea of a great world?

this is the best possible scenario, people getting educated and move back to their home countries to better it. that's a lot better than everyone pouring into one country and leaving the others as a mess or poor.

 

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Most of them stay in the US for the long term, rather than return to China. Even considering those who do return home, the fact of their having come to US schools to perform and patent their research contributes to the advancement of those US schools at the expense of foreign ones.

Most of the faculty at my university (a highly ranked science/engineering research university) were American citizens, although a great deal of them were born elsewhere. I was never mistreated - on the contrary, American students are highly sought-after by research profs since they are eligible for a variety of grants and support that foreign students are not, and also helpful in attracting corporate sponsorship (companies are wary of paying to educate foreign students who may then emigrate and work for their competitors abroad).

 

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state sponsored torture, executions of mentally retarded women and children, worlds largest prison population. China or US?

 

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The supreme arrogance of the US never fails to amaze me. Illegal wars, waterboarding, thousands of civillians summarily shot on the streets of iraq..yeah, great...

 

name for me one good modern day dictatorship.

 

I never said we were perfect. But if your delusional enough to believe that the Chinese have not done enough than you need to open your eyes.

 

Its called life, the only time its not messy is when your dead.

 

BTW, the technology and chips that made it possible for China to achieve this crown through parallel processing comes from an American company.

The Chinese didn't invent this tech, they merely bought tons of US chips, slapped them together and made a supercomputer.

In that respect they don't really deserve the crown because they didn't really make the tech themselves, they literally just bought it.

 

It's still applied technology though. Look, I'm not here to diss the US at all -but what is so hard about recognising someone elses achievements?..you dont have a monopoly on inventiveness you know.

 

I don't see where anyone has done that. China's advances are fine by me - and such is exactly what the entire US-led world order was supposed to achieve anyway.

But the context on this forum is that we have a lot of people who obsess over the US, and go around exaggerating every piece of news to come out of China into some harbinger of the imminent demise of the USA. Note that this thread didn't even make it past the end of the OP before being made about American Declinism.

And then there's the standard script, wherein anyone who cuts down the inflated claims about Chinese prowess is labelled an arrogant American who just can't accept that China is destroying us and will dominate the computer industry for the rest of human history, blah blah blah.

I did recognize China's accomplishment: they designed a good interconnect (which is not trivial) and ponied up a bunch of cash to buy American computer parts and expertise. Good for them. Japan did the same thing a few years back, Germany's done it repeatedly, etc. And every time, the US comes back with ever-faster computers in short order. We're the top dog because we invented all of the major technology and have been running full steam with it for generations now.

And such will happen again. The US already has multiple faster computers in the works, and did before this Chinese machine was ever announced. But does anyone want to wager on whether we'll see a thread titled "USA reclaims supercomputer crown," with a bunch of comparably shallow nationalist bloviating? I strongly doubt it. These threads are simply pretenses for people with "China Destroys USA" psychodramas to tilt at windmills.

 

No offense, but slapping together SOMEONE ELSES chips and claiming the inventiveness crown is less of actual innovation and more of taking credit for someone else's work.

ultra, what exactly did they achieve? Pressing the "buy" button for US made chips does not impress me.

If they made, designed, and invented it themselves than sure, they deserve some praise.

The only praise they deserve is being that willing to spend that much money on it. Which isn't a bad thing, but its the equivolant of me buying the best engine, frame, car, and parts in the world, slapping them together and claiming to have completely invented the best car in the world. I didn't invent it, I just slapped together the best parts.

 

Yes, granted. The parts' pedigree were never in doubt - but you still have to construct and program and analyze it before it will even work..and seeing as the Chinese are pretty good at building our platforms for us, why should we be surprised. All they have to do is reverse-engineer the chips to find out how to make them ever more efficient. Let them have thier day in the sun, it won't last long anyway..that's all I'm saying.

 

No offense ULTRA, but reverse engineering is a lot harder than you think, especially considering the complexity of the chips. I have the consummer version of the cards that run that supercomputer. It has 480 computer cores and 3.12 BILLION transisters. And that's the consummer version.

And no offense, but China is not known for efficiency. Programming is not hard. Seriously, its a lot easier than completely inventing a new supercomputer which they did not do.

 

And don't forget nvidia's parallel processing beast fermi.

 

So if China did not invent their supercomputer but rather slapped together parts, than all they deserve credit for is building a really big computer. Which considering I could build a water cooled computer in junior year in high school it does not impress me.

Inventing a computer chip takes years of research. That is why China HAD to buy the parts. They literally can't compete. Its the same reason why Intel's atom got its ass kicked by the nvidia ion which beat it at 2-5 times the performance while still being cheaper. And the same thing happened with the apple A4 vs. nvidia Tegra 2. Chip making is a cumulative piece of work. If you try to jump into the market you will get your ass shot out before you can say "oops".

It would take china half a decade at best to come up with a competitor to the fermi card they had to buy for their supercomputer.

 

No offense taken. But if AMD that made my humble quad core setup here and succeed then surely the chinks with all the brain-power at thier disposal should be able to mash these new cores together properly and learn from the experience. I just hope they don't start putting them in missiles etc!!

 

Actually the computers in missiles and fighters are not that complicated hardware wise. If I recall correctly the F-22 raptor's main control computer has 256 mb of RAM.

The reason nvidia has an advantage over AMD in this computer type is because of CUDA.

AMD and Nvidia have very different ways of approaching a graphics card. AMD makes a sophisticated processor and clocks it as high as possible to do as much work as possible.

Nvidia believes in creating a complex architecture centered around individual computer cores. For example, my Geforce 480 GTX has 480 cores. While each core is far less capable than a comparable AMD card, all 480 working together work together by having each individual one work on its own little job and then combining them all together.

To give you an idea, the new 500 series of card, it has I believe 520 cores, it has been shown to beat AMD's 5970 in a lot of benchmarks. That means it is beating not one, but two of AMD's fastest chips that individually are clocked almost twice as high.

This is great for servers and supercomputers that often have massive jobs that can be subdivided into billions of smaller jobs that each core will process at the same time.

It gives nvidia a leg up on tesselation because in a given period of time what takes an AMD chip to process 12 new triangles the nvidia will process 100 because all the cores are working together at the same time.

But there are cases where having a single super fast processor is an advantage.

 

Apparently the interconnect (an importent component of any modern supercomputer) was designed and built in China. They deserve credit for that. Apparently there are also some Chinese-designed processors included in the system as well, but these have so far been excluded from the operation and performance calculations (not sure why, or what's up with them).

Who is "you" there? AFAIK, the major work of systems integration and operating systems programming was accomplished by people outside China (and mostly in the USA). It runs Linux, after all. The percentage of the technology in that machine that's indigenously Chinese is quite small.

I've also been told that this machine would never have been possible without the US having lifted certain export restrictions last summer. Which is to say that the USA could prevent any further such advances in Chinese supercomputing simply by reinstating them.

Our computer platforms? Not sure what you're talking about here.

Easier said than done. In fact, China had a program to do exactly that about a decade ago which was cancelled after it was publicized that the researchers were simply buying American chips, stripping off the packaging, sticking them in a new package, and passing them off as original Chinese designs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanxin

Moreover, even if one could reverse-engineer the layout of a chip, that still wouldn't tell you how to manufacture the thing. Manufacturing of cutting-edge microchips is an incredibly complex and expensive endeavour, requiring thousands of materials scientists, physicists, manufacturing experts, engineers, etc. to undertake. Even supposing one could replicate that (highly dubious), the prospect of coming up with an improved design is not so easy - the US has thousands more engineers and scientists working on that problem, and has for decades.

Bottom line is that China and numerous other countries have been trying for decades - without success - to incubate their own Silicon Valleys. As of yet, nobody even has one that can keep up with Silicon Valley, let alone surpass it. Until China starts making competitive microprocessors, talk of their "day in the sun" as a computing leader is grossly premature. What this is is their "day in the sun" as a holder of a bunch of dollars that they can spend buying computer technology from the USA.