China's petaflop computer

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Today's People's Daily claims only the US has one. (true or false?) No data given at CPD site.

It sure looks physically big to me. Do you think it is uses tubes?

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I know next to nothing about all this, but am courious how far China is behind the US in this field and why did they build it? Any comments?

 

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Well if you noticed the units are just big enough for a Chinese person to fit they do billions of calculations per second as well as offer a domicile to people with out one.

 

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But who told you that it's petaflop?Any sources?..

 

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http://www.hpcwire.com/blogs/China-Joins-Petaflop-Club-67358662.html

 

WOW,that's amazing.I wonder what they are going to use it for.
Thanks for the link.

 

military. calculations of missiles projectiles.

 

But do the calculations of missile projectiles require petaflops?I thought teraflops were more than enough.

 

its my speculation. After all tracking missiles and their probable projectiles as well as the new separating shells (where missiles separates into different fragments of projectiles and use diversion to reach a target) does require lots of calculations.

I don't know.

 

it probably the firewall.

 

I see.
Anyway,I hope there is no war.
Peace.

 

Bravo! John, that's the funniest thing you've come up with ever!

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As stated in the OP, my original source was the Chinese People's Daily (which I read ever day). If you filter out the propaganda, it is a remarkably good source of global news, often breaking financial stories before Bloomberg, and unsurpassed for Chinese news. Here is more detail, just out from US source:

"The machine's data has been submitted for ranking in the Top500 list, which is next due out in November, Xinhua said, citing faculty at the university in China's inland Hunan province. The computer will be used for bio-medical computing, seismic data processing during oil exploration and for the design of "aerospace vehicles," it said.

The computer has over 11,000 microprocessors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices and cost at least 600 million yuan (US$88 million) to build, the agency said. It will be moved to a supercomputing center in the northeastern city of Tianjin later this year, Xinhua said.

Dawning, a Chinese government-backed hardware maker, is separately designing a petaflop supercomputer it hopes to deploy next year. That system is planned to use Godson CPUs, also known by the name Loongson, a domestic chip line designed with government funding to expand China's pool of domestically owned technology. China-made CPUs will also be added to the Milky Way supercomputer in the future to further boost its speed, Xinhua said."

From: http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti..._fastest?source=CTWNLE_nlt_dailyam_2009-10-30

 

I would think that too.

I suspect that it is true that it will be used for "bio-dynamic studies." Such as detailed modeling of how mRNA passes thru the "factory" (I forget its name, just now) to assemble proteins and then follow how the initially linear protein folds up into a 3D structure, etc.

 

why do they need all those gpu's? any details on similar ones?

 

A little more data from today's Chinese People's Daily:

"... the 155-ton system, with 103 refrigerator-like cabinets lined up on an area of about 1,000 square meters, is expected to process seismic data for oil exploration, conduct bio-medical computing and help design aerospace vehicles. {Making a "wind tunnel" in computer's digital bits is much cheaper and every point is as if a 100% accurate sensor were there, without the disturbance a real sensor would make.}

China's national high-technology research and development program and the Binhai New Area, a major economic development zone in the northern port city of Tianjin jointly financed Tianhe,{Chinese computer's name = "milky way"} which cost at least 600 million yuan (88.24 million U.S. dollars).

Tianhe's peak performance reaches 1.206 petaflops, and it runs at 563.1 teraflops (1,000 teraflops equals one petaflop) on the Linpack benchmark, which was originally developed by U.S. computer scientist Jack Dongarra and has become an internationally recognized method to measure a supercomputer's real performance in practical use. ..."

From: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90782/6798581.html

I might note that that the processing of seismic signals is some what like the processing of sonar signals trying to pull and identify a particular submarine's (or surface ship) signature out of the noisy sea.

 

At the other extreme in size, China has improved the computers it bought from IBM a few years ago:

"How ThinkPad Stacks Up Against Dell and HP

Lenovo has taken the ThinkPad X300 to the next level. The T400 is thin, light, durable, supports VoIP and much more. This white paper provides a side-by-side comparison of the T400 vs. Dell and HP. From form factor to memory, the specs tell the whole story."

http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/5855224/490950610/234399/0/

 

That stuff doesn't require supercomputer performance.

The military applications are in simulation of warhead dynamics, and always have been. Doubly so now that actual critical testing is prohibited by treaty.

 

One petaflop computer? Definitely false. The previous Top500 list (from June) lists 3 petaflop computers, 2 in the US and 1 in Germany. Perhaps they were referring to the specific architecture/processor technology?

The United States dominates the field of big supercomputers. They're designed and manufactured almost exclusively by American companies (Intel, AMD, Cray, IBM, HP, Sun). 8 of the 10 fastest machines in the June 2009 top500 are in the US (the other 2 are in Germany). IBM has already announced a 20 petaflop supercomputer for deployment at Livermore National Lab in 2011.

China is pretty much a non-entity in the world of supercomputers. None of the technology originates there, nor is any of the critical manufacturing carried out there. Until this latest effort, they did not possess a single supercomputer worth mentioning. And, unless they continue to invest very heavily, they will soon return to that status.

You may recall Japan making waves back in 2002 when they put together the fastest computer in the world, the Earth Simulator. It is still the fastest computer in Japan, but no longer even in the top 20 worldwide. In the 7 years since Earth Simulator went online, the US has installed 14 systems that outperform it: that's 2 every year.

 

Yes and the key word in that link is joins. The Chinese weren't the first to make a petaflop farm and therefore we the U.S. probably do have a petaflop farm in fact I think we have many. I even think that we the U.S. were the first country to reach a petflop probably with the help of IBM's technoloogy. sigh.............. Wake me when the day comes when a yetaflop can be done on a normal desktop.

btw for those of you who don't know what a yetafolp iss here's a link with a chart on it except this chart refers to it as far as size but they're the same principle term. http://www.greenpete.co.uk/?m=200703 look at the data storage and size post.