China's petaflop computer

Codebreaking would be one.

That would be throughput data rate limited, and there are similar applications that are indeed computationally limited. There is no shortage of problems that derive their scale from parallelsim and real-time constraints rather than innate complexity as such - the number of intercepted cellular calls that one can decode and present to an automatic speech recognition system in real time is highly limited by available computational power, for example, and not input bandwidth (it would take millions of simultaneous calls at usual data rates to approach the input bandwidth of a modern supercomputer, but trying to run millions of decoders and speech recognizers would tax the processing power). Likewise, the number of video streams that one can decode and apply automatic face recognition software to, in real time.

But regardless, one doesn't want to reveal the memory system throughput of such systems any more than one wants to reveal their peak processing speed. Note that the systems designed for solving intensive physics and engineering problems aren't among the secret ones: those appear right there on the top500 list at Oakridge, Los Alamos, Sandia, Livermore, etc. The secret ones are Pentagon and CIA/NSA machines that deal with command-and-control, surveillance, intelligence, codes, etc. The operational parameters of such machines have security implications, since they're used in real-time operations. As you note, the exact processing speed of machines used for offline scientific computation aren't particularly salient - whether the simulation takes 4 hours or 8 makes little difference there. But whether one can automatically track 100,000 phone conversations or 1,000,000 at a given time makes a big difference.

 

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Codebreaking takes human ingenuity. Are you saying that computer can decipher Zodiacs unbroken letter?

 

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No, it doesn't. Computers do it a lot better than we ever could. And we don't even know it the Zodiac alphabet is even a language. As far as investigators are concerned today, it could have been random jibberish thrown together to keep the police running in circles.

 

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It is an alphabet that he made up, aka cipher.

Random gibberish is not likely since the others were broken and contained actual data that was relevant to the case.

 

"... A new supercomputer from Japan whose performance passed the 8 petaflop milestone ended China's brief period atop the list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

The Japanese system also set another all-time Top 500 record -- a 10 megawatt power rating while running the Linpack test used to determine system performance. Despite the significant power consumption, the K Computer achieved "extraordinarily high computing efficiency," said RIKEN and Fujitsu, in a statement. ..."

From: http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...mputing_surge?source=CTWNLE_nlt_pm_2011-06-20

 

Chin's first "fully Chinese" super computer is now working:

"... China's National Supercomputer Center in Jinan unveiled the computer last Thursday, according to a report from the country's state-run press. The supercomputer uses 8,704 "Shenwei 1600" microprocessors, which were developed by a design center in Shanghai, called the National High Performance Integrated Circuit Design Center. ...

The supercomputer has a theoretical peak speed of 1.07 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), and a sustained performance of 0.79 petaflops when measured with the Linpack benchmark. This could place it at number 13 in the world's top 500 supercomputing list. ... " {China still holds the #2 spot behind Japan, in the 500 but used western CPUs to do that}

From: http://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...wn_chips?source=CTWNLE_nlt_dailyam_2011-10-31

 

Fujitsu is "western?"

I mean, sure, the designs are all based on SPARC architecture acquired from HAL back in the 1990s. But the ShenWei processors are likewise bites of old DEC Alpha architectures.

Anyway, the really core piece of a modern supercomputer is the interconnect, not the CPUs.