Posted on 11/16/2010 11:30:31 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
By Therese Poletti, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — The big news is now official. A Chinese scientific research center has developed the world’s fastest supercomputer, a title it wrestled from the United States using a combination of Silicon Valley technology and some major innovations by their own engineers.
China first heralded the performance of the system, the Tianhe-1A, in late October. But Sunday’s list of the 500 fastest machines in the world at the supercomputer industry’s annual conference in New Orleans confirmed that bragging rights have shifted from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee to Tianjin, China. In addition, another supercomputer, called Nebulae, at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, was the third fastest in the world. See latest Top500 list here.
China’s move to the top echelon of computing is not much of a surprise for those who follow high performance computing. Six months ago, these same two Chinese systems were in the top 10, in different order, but the U.S. maintained its No. 1 spot with Cray Inc.’s Jaguar machine, at Oak Ridge. Hence, fears that the U.S. might be losing a technology edge were muted.
But the anointing of the Tianhe-1A system, which in Chinese means “sky river,” or Milky Way, to such revered status is surely a kick in the pants to U.S. innovation — and a signal that China has set its sights on becoming a tech superpower as it looks beyond its core manufacturing prowess.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
fyi
It’s not going to drive “sabre-rattling”.
I bet they aren’t modeling climate with their computing power.
Should read "500 fastest machines known about in the world". We have machines in places that don't exist doing things that the Chinese have not a clue about.
My company, Bull, posted #6. I visited their entry in the list in France last month on the customer site. It is also the fastest supercomputer in Europe.
“We have machines in places that don’t exist doing things that the Chinese have not a clue about.”
Good, as long as they don’t become self-aware.
Forty One of the “Top 500” supercomputers are in China.
Two Hundred Seventy Four of the “Top 500” supercomputers are in these United States.
AFAIK, the shift is away from single fast cores to paralell processing.
But great - isn’t this like how we riled up the USSR into building bigger & bigger nukes that were useless?
“one bomb for Russia”, a certain represenattive said
Perhaps I am a self aware supercomputer involved in a massive Turing Test.
Yes ... for at least the last 20 years.
Go to the "Top 500" link; they list the number of processors in each machine.
See link at #12.
Wasn’t it Bill Clinton who allowed previuously embargoed super computers to be sold to China in the first place? And wasn’t it Bill Clinton who was mired in some kind of Chinese Political Fund raising Scandal? Do the names Charlie Trie, John Huang and Johnny Chung ring a bell?
Thanks Bill!
Not my area of expertise but seems to me that if you put enough of things together, write your bench mark cleverly, and you can get an arbitrarily high speed.
The feat isn't this benchmark. The feat is they've shown that they know what they are doing.
and that Chin Supercomputer is prolly whats melting them...
However, the CPUs, controllers, processor cards and the busses are all made in the US by Intel, Nvida and others.
The Chinese are learning quick and may soon be making those on their own processors but they are not there yet
bflr
There was a post of FR not long ago about the University of West Virginia tying together a bunch of Mac G5s, 1,100 I think, and that system was almost as fast as the Cray Super Computer at about 1/100th of the cost. Something like $350,000,000 vs $3,500,000.
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