China Overtakes US In Latest Top 500 Supercomputer List (enterprisecloudnews.com) 110
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Enterprise Cloud News: The release of the semiannual Top 500 Supercomputer List is a chance to gauge the who's who of countries that are pushing the boundaries of high-performance computing. The most recent list, released Monday, shows that China is now in a class by itself. China now claims 202 systems within the Top 500, while the United States -- once the dominant player -- tumbles to second place with 143 systems represented on the list. Only a few months ago, the U.S. had 169 systems within the Top 500 compared to China's 160. The growth of China and the decline of the United States within the Top 500 has prompted the U.S. Department of Energy to doll out $258 million in grants to several tech companies to develop exascale systems, the next great leap in HPC. These systems can handle a billion billion calculations a second, or 1 exaflop. However, even as these physical machines grow more and more powerful, a good portion of supercomputing power is moving to the cloud, where it can be accessed by more researchers and scientists, making the technology more democratic.
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How big are the clouds at Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc? I suspect if you could afford it, AWS would be #1.
Re: It's really only the U.S. and China (Score:2)
There are plenty of problems that can happily use conviently parallel algorithms. The interconnect latency usually only matters if you are simulating a large memory.
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The cloud is on its way out (Score:1)
Right now the big push is towards the chicken wing. Chicken Wing computing is similar to the cloud.... but it has wings, making your data more readily available and more secure with highly ruffled feathers on the network perimeter.
Chicken wing storage and supercomputing is the future.
You will bankrupt yourselves trying to keep up. (Score:1)
China has give or take 4.4 times pop. as USA. They have more middle class people than you have people total. That middle class is growing rapidly because there are a huge number of poor who are being raised up to middle class over time as the country prospers and more and more of the world economy moves to China, and the GDP/pop is going up very fast.
Eventually you will be unable to keep up in any domain: computing, military, mfg, world clout, anything. Rather than drive yourselves into the dirt trying t
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Re:You will bankrupt yourselves trying to keep up. (Score:5, Funny)
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Not just super computing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not just super computing... (Score:5, Insightful)
The rich spend boat-loads of money convincing the population that trickle-down either works, or would work if we reach a sufficient level of tax breaks and deregulation. So far this bribery, I mean investment, appears to be paying off because at least half the country accepts it.
I do fear a slippery slope: the richer the rich get the more they spend on convincing the population that their own well-being depends on fat cats staying fat, given them even more power to get more power. The ever growing inequality since around 1980 is evidence of a slippery slope, or at least a trend somehow "stuck" going up.
The idea of "corporate personhood" is not in the Constitution, but has slowly worked its way into common law by judges placed there by the rich. Some aspects of corporate personhood do have legal value in terms of deciding how to apply existing laws to corporations, but it's been way overdone.
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It would be funny to "jail" a corporation, give it community service etc.
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Or even a death penalty for companies.
Knowingly break the rules killing hundreds?
You're now government property to be auctioned off to new owners.
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Nothing like that is needed. Simply fine an appreciable percentage of revenue. 10% for first offence would be a good level. Go up in increments of 10% after that.
Won't happen, because 'lobbying' as a fig leaf for endemic corruption is completely acceptable.
Of course, this would all come unstuck if the people started voting for people who might change all this, but that won't happen either.
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For one, most other countries will tax them fairly heavily. Second, it's not easy to move certain kinds of assets out.
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I'm planning on marrying a supermodel. Think it will work?
If you're sufficiently rich, of course.
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That's because, tyrants or not, the ruling class in China are composed of scientists and engineers. They are able to plan for the future with rational thought processes.
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um. TBH, I think both examples you mention for the US and UK are what make those two places better than China. Is it better to have a benevolent dictator or democracy? You seem to choose the benevolent dictator by your post. Democracy has always meant that a babbling man-child can be elected. Freedom means that you can impose self-inflicted injuries. The benevolent dictator is only better so long as they stay benevolent.
China does have an interesting culture that has a very long sighted view. One example I
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It doesn't stand for anything.
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Using the cloud makes more sense... (Score:2)
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The Top500 list measures xhpl performance only. While it is hurt by poor interconnect, it can still turn out solid numbers on a typical 10gb network.
Truth is, the crappiness of a single dimension to measure the Top500 has been a well-known thing for at least 15 years. Interconnect can matter for a great deal of technical computing, but then again, sometimes plain ethernet is fine. Sometimes you don't need large memory amounts per node or decent single-threaded performance, but then again sometimes you do
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Unless the researchers have a steady need for the computations, moving work to the cloud makes more sense. Why build a multi-million dollar facility when you can just rent the computers for a day or two for your computation?
Of course we do. Top500 centres are almost exclusively used for scientific computations. In my field 128-256 GiB of RAM per node and an InfiniBand interconnect @40gbps+ are needed for reasonable performance, with typical jobs using hundreds of CPU cores and larger ones perhaps 8192 CPU cores. Most of sparse matrix algebra requires a lot of comms, things grind to a halt when the interconnect is slow. You can't do this kind of stuff in the cloud, not today.
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Country of the century (Score:2)
The 20th century was dominated by the USA. The 19th century was dominated by the United Kingdom. It looks rather likely (as demonstrated by this story) that the 21st century will be dominated by China. Can we find other nice clean examples?
I suggest:
16th century Spain (on the back of New World gold and silver)
Anything earlier than this is well short of global impact, due to lack of communications (particularly between the Americas and the rest of the world)
13th century Mongolia
8th century expansion of Isla
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Japan? (Score:1)
They gave up on this world, too many stinking Westerners, instead they've taken over via world with dragons, hot loli princesses, and talking cats.
Quite the improvement, really.
what happened to Japan ? (Score:2)
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Um, post WWII Japan after WWII, with its pacifist constitution is a protected state of the US. Japan is also a democracy. None of those is true for China. China is building up its economy and military to directly challenge the US. China believes its prefect blend of authoritarian capitalism is a superior system to our flawed democracy. A better comparison will be to compare China to pre WWII Japan.
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No, the biggest threat to world peace is American nativsim and isolationism
The world has been demanding an end to American meddling for quite some time. Maybe you've been watching fake news?
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I'm with you except for the poet part. Have you read German poetry? The Germans I know don't even like German poetry. Maybe I could at least see an argument for opera or symphony, but Poetry?
Oblig Ice station Zebra: "The Russians put our camera made by *our* German scientists and your film made by *your* German scientists into their satellite made by *their* German scientists."
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I'm with you except for the poet part. Have you read German poetry?
The Vogons would like a word with you...
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My criterion was world-dominant nations, and world domination tends to require expansion. I'm pacifist, so if you want to make a list of countries which achieved great influence without expansionism, I'd be happy to receive it.
20th C USA and 21st C China are (so far) not so much into expanding their borders, although they are into projecting military and economic power to influence other parts of the world to their advantage. (The non-expansionism is recent: 19th C USA was very much into expanding its borde
As a German ... (Score:1)
Who cares?
Stop thinking in countries! And in US VS THEM. Research never gave a crap about any of that.
First and foremost, we are humans. And first and foremost, our research is meant to benefit all of us! So no matter if the people who did it happen to be born in an Area that we are told to currently call "China" or an area that we are currently told to call "USA" ... yay! Well done! You are a role model for humans everywhere!
I can be happy for them, because in any case, I see them as US, not as THEM.
But ma
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There's always a reason (Score:2)
What are we trying to accomplish? (Score:4, Insightful)
Should we really be worried about this? Maybe it's heresy here; but what are they doing with these systems? Are the Chinese using them to solve problems that are more interesting and important, or are they just using them to build prestige? Does it really say anything about the country, or are these systems just the computing equivalent of Dubai skyscrapers? Dubai is blowing us away in the skyscraper dept., but I don't want to live there. China might blow us away in flops on these computers, but if they're not doing any interesting science or other applications on them, so what?
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Problem being that 60-75% of their entries are Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent. Whether as a favor to their vendors or for the national image, they let their resources be used to make China look good.
This would be akin to Microsoft, Amazon, and Google colluding to use their install footprint to maximize US share on the list. Instead, they are very secretive and screw their vendors over and don't really have any incentive to prop up the story of US as an HPC leader.
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Good question. I think the Chinese will want to keep those answers under wraps, because their probably using a lot of them for military work. Regarding the pissing contest, everyone "games" benchmarks like these. They call it "tuning" for the workload. The exclusive workload in these cases are--waitforit--the benchmarks themselves. So, they're certainly an indication of what one might expect IRL, but, like auto MPG ratings, not the final word.
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They are doing interesting science. Unlike us here in the US who now have laurel imprints on our fat overweight buttocks, the Chinese are actually thinking about the future. They're going to eat our lunch in every field, in every sector, because we have let fat rich assholes systematically dismantle and destroy everything that used to be innovative in this country. The fat cats have drained so much wealth out of the system that just about everyone starts out in debt. Researchers have to fight for scraps fro
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They are using their supercomputers for things like materials science, developing new medicines and therapies, AI systems, climate science, genetic modelling... And the tech trickles down too, both in terms of the hardware that is developed and the techniques developed for managing hugely parallel machines.
Also, in a few years they will have all the bitcoins.
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Should we really be worried about this? Maybe it's heresy here; but what are they doing with these systems? Are the Chinese using them to solve problems that are more interesting and important, or are they just using them to build prestige?M
Despite what the West likes to think about China, I highly doubt the Chinese are building these just for mere prestige. They are building know-how. We use to do that. Now, if we cannot immediately predict a definite ROI, we do not even bother to investigate, build know-how or develop social capital.
Does it really say anything about the country, or are these systems just the computing equivalent of Dubai skyscrapers? Dubai is blowing us away in the skyscraper dept., but I don't want to live there. China might blow us away in flops on these computers, but if they're not doing any interesting science or other applications on them, so what?
Are you sure about that, that they are not doing anything interesting or useful (assuming then that accumulating know-how is not useful in itself.) I'm sorry but comparing Dubai's skyscrapper rush with Chinese cl
Who would have guessed (Score:2)
The year of the Linux supercomputer happened before the year of the Linux desktop.
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anyone who has followed supercomputers for more than 20 years knows that, Linux supercomputers existed in the late 1990s.
Get Behind, Stay Behind (Score:2)
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Then the big news here is Switzerland overtaking the U.S.A and Japan and moving to #3. Watch out, the future will be a noisy place of yodeling and coo-coo clocks, and your cheese will have empty voids in it.
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You think Africa is a country do you?
Holy shit, you're stupid.