Japan Builds World's Fastest Computer

claylikethemud writes "The New York Times reports that Japan has built the world's most powerful supercomputer from "640 specialized nodes that are in turn composed of 5,104" NEC processors. The machine boasts the computing power equivalent to the 20 fastest American supercomputers combined, and with a top speed of 35.6 teraflops, outpaces the next fastest machine, the ASCI White Pacific, by more than factor of five. Applications include climate modeling, global warming prediction, and other non-weapons research."

Comments

More protectionism

[saihung]

Also worth noting is that the article mentions that the US gov't has blocked sales of these machines because they believe that NEC is "dumping" them on the US market - eg selling them below cost. Has there been any WTO action on these restrictions? Wouldn't this be a perfect test case for getting US trade restrictions struck down?

Re:More protectionism

[Anonymous Coward]

The Japanese vendors (e.g. Fujitsu, NEC) have historically tried to undercut the high performance computer (HPC) vendors. HPC is a difficult enough nmarket in the U.S. due to the small numbers of customers, strong competition and shifts in govt. direction (which is a big problem as Govt. both regulates and is the biggest customer). The Japanese govt. protects and subsidizes its supercomputing vendors. Although HPC is a small part of the computing market, HPC develops technology which becomes mainstream, such as Vector Processing (MMX instruction set in Pentiums), SuperScalar, Pipelining, Dynamic Scheduling of FPUS, as well as some ideas that may catch on soon, e.g. VLIW in Intel's IA-64, Simultaneous Multithreading and Multiple processors on a chip. With the current patenting climate, it may be that we will be paying license fees for patents generated by the HPC people. The U.S. should try to revitalize its HPC industry before processor design and production goes the way of Steel, Cars, and Motherboards (memory almost went that way, but Micron may stop it).

The Model is to follow ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The supercomputer was built with 'the earth systems model' in mind. This will be the most ambitious computer model ever concieved. It aims to simulate every aspect of the earth system climate - including more processes than ever before: atmospheric processes, ocean processes,land surface feedbacks and land use models, economic models, ice sheet models, at a higher resolution than ever before.

Predictably the model is rumoured to be still 2 years off target yet - so there is the worlds fastest computer sitting idle for the mean time.

Perhaps I could buy some space to run my webpage off it in the mean time ... ;-)

NY times login generator

[haedesch]

generates a login:
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html

Re:US:bombs vs. Japan: environment

[Schwarzchild]

The accomplishment is also a dramatic statement of contrasting scientific and technology priorities in the United States and Japan. The Japanese machine was built to analyze climate change, including global warming, as well as weather and earthquake patterns. The United States has predominantly focused its efforts on building powerful computers for simulating weapons.

Not surprising. Not in the least. Of course, the United States government is going to be spending its cash on simulating nuclear weapons. They have to. They have nuclear weapons. The Japanese, as far as I know, don't. Japan was stripped of a military after World War II probably because the U.S. feared that the same thing would happen to Japan that happened to Germany after WWI, that is, that Japan would get strong again and attack. That is probably why they don't have a military (I think they now have a token military but not a real one) and have no need to simulate nuclear weapons.

As for being the fastest. IBM's Blue Gene will outstrip this Japanese model in two or three years. That's the downside. It will be two or three years from now. Oh well, it will run at One-Petaflop.

Re:US:bombs vs. Japan: environment

[Oswald]

Actually, it seems that both countries have aimed their programs squarely at 'solving' their fears. The U.S. has the paranoia that goes with being the biggest kid on the block, with every other asshole wanting a piece of you--so they (we--I'm American) concentrate on weapons. The Japanese seem to worry about bad weather--something about living on an archipelago in the middle of the Pacific Ocean--so they want to simulate it.

The irony is that both could achieve perfect success with these computers and still be very far from fixing their problem. Perfect understanding of nuclear explosions is only a tiny, tiny piece of the national security equation, and perfect understanding of how typhoons are born, live and die still leaves you a very long way from knowing how to turn one off.

BTW, my daytime job is in aviation. I wish the Japanese all the success in the world at improving weather forecasting--the current state of the art is a disgrace.

Re:Non Weapon research??

[TeaDaemon]

This is, of course, one reason why the post-war Japanese economy was so successful for most of the second half of the 20th century. whilst we were pouring all available resources into 'defence' research, they were getting on with something a litle more useful and productive.

It seems a largely successful strategy and it might be better if more countries were to consider it.

Pictures here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pictures here. so cool!

Re:US:bombs vs. Japan: environment

[MrEd]

the U.S. feared that the same thing would happen to Japan that happened to Germany after WWI, that is, that Japan would get strong again and attack.

I'm more of a believer that the US foreign policy folks realized that making Japan artificially weak, in the manner that Germany was treated post WWI with their 'reparations' penalties, would be to repeat a horrible mistake. This would only generate resentment amongst the people, paving the way for 'dynamic leadership' i.e. another fascist/totalitarian government, this time in Japan.

By re-making Japan in their own image, the Americans gained a strong ally instead of creating a bitter foe. Why attack the nation that put you back on your feet? There's a lesson to be learned there.

Comutation required for climate/pollution modeling

[sisukapalli1]

It takes about a few weeks on Sun ultra sparcs to simulate a week long air pollution scenario over the north eastern united states. This is assuming a 8x8 km grid (where the 8x8 sqkm area is one "point"). The wind modeling is extremely simplified, and the focus is on a select set of contaminants.

To do a detailed wind modeling, and have a finer resolution, and to do some statistical analysis of different input conditions... suddenly we end up with requirements far more than the current computing power.

We can always come up with a problem that is more complex than we can solve using current computing power. That is a good pursuit.

S

Re:US:bombs vs. Japan: environment

[DNS-and-BIND]

North Korea and China, mainly. Did you know that North Korea sends spy ships to the Japanese coast? They drop off commandos, who kidnap Japanese citizens, who are taken back to North Korea, where presumably they provide some kind of intelligence regarding current events in Japan. I'm not kidding, this really happens and is a sore spot between Japan and North Korea (Japan wants its citizens back). Japan's MSDF recently sunk a spy ship that opened fire when it was intercepted.

Now admit you're ignorant of the security situation in East Asia and we'll go on. "Who are they defending themselves from". . . what a Chomskyite statement. Believe it or not, a military is in fact necessary even for pacifist regimes like Japan.

35 teraflops. Wow!

[Utopia]

This is faster than the SETI network.
SETI operates at 17 teraflops, but at a cost of only $500000.

Re:Japan and weapons.

[JabberWokky]

Ireland and Switzerland both have cultural heritages based on western civilization, last I checked, and western civilization has had a profound influence from the historical events that have occured in Israel. They are not culturally neutral, last I checked. A wee bit more Christians than Muslums or Jews.

--
Evan