China Building Linux-Based 10 Teraflop Supercomputer

securitas writes "CNet Asia reports that China is building a 2000-processor supercomputer based on the AMD Opteron 64-bit CPU. The new supercomputer will run a Chinese-designed Linux operating system. Based on current standings, the resulting 10-teraflop machine will make it the third most powerful supercomputer in the world. The Red Grid project is being built by Dawning Information Industry and China's National Research Centre for Intelligent Computing Systems. The Red Grid/Dawning 4000A is expected to be complete by June 2004. But China has competition - weighing in at 40 teraflops, the Cray Red Storm AMD-based 10,000-Opteron supercomputer built for Sandia National Labs will become the supercomputer heavyweight next year. More at Infoworld , InternetNews and Yahoo."

Comments

Itanium

[Anonymous Coward]

What, no Itaniums? :-P

Now AMD, if you could only get your desktop solution out there for a nice price...

Air con

[danormsby]

The big story should be about the air conditioning system for this baby.

AMD

[delphin42]

This should do a lot for AMD's credibility as a server processor manufacturer. According to the current top500 list, you have to go to number 84 to find an AMD based supercomputer. If these articles are correct, you'll soon have 2 in the top 5. That's quite a change of events.

The Next Space Race?

[Psx29]

Maybe its just me...but it seems like there is increasing competition for the top supercomputer. Japan holds the top at the moment, and the US is home to the second most powerful...and now china is entering into the fray. Of course there undoubtely other countries besides the top 3 that are trying to earn a place as well. I wonder if India will be next?

Re:The Next Space Race?

[blibbleblobble]

"Japan holds the top at the moment, and the US is home to the second most powerful"

Japan has the world's most powerful computer, and they're using it to model climate change and to do scientific research into how the earth works.

America has the world's second most powerful computer. They use it to help build things to make big explosions.

Also interesting

[Waab]

The University of Kentucky is still doing interesting things with Athlons & Linux. Just about two weeks ago, a group there built KASY0, which they expect to set a new price/performance record at better than 1GFLOPS/$100. More about KASY0 here.

I think that Communist China will overtake US.

[Krapangor]

I don't think that the US will be the world's most powerful nation in long term. China has much more resources and population and therefore the chance to overtake the US in the next 20 years. Let's list Chinas benefits over the US:

1. Population: sheer mass counts. If US has 1 genius in 1 million people, than we have 400 geniuses in the US. But China would have 1.100 which is quite an advantage.
2. Education system: The US has a better starting position, but China is rapidly gaining. Chinese have thrown away all Mao anti-illectual rubbish and know to value knowledge these days.
3. Traditions: The confucian traditions imply total devotion to work and society. However, the US tradition imply total devotion to self interest and egoism. So, the Chinese society have much better chance to complete large scale and high effort projects. The US have problems there. Take e.g. Iraq we have our boys just a few months there, but already the press is whining that some of them are dying. Even worse the US economic system is based on these "values", so we can't change them without having our society collapse.
4. Resources: China has many natural resources. Even more there are much resources in the neighboring countries. These are very weak, so China has just to blackmail or to conquer them to get the resources.
5. Legal bonds: there is not much copyright and IP enforced in China. So free from all patent and IP bounds China's economics and science can develop much faster.
6. Less restricted goverment: In China the goverment doesn't have to obey very much restrictions. So they don't have to spend so much money on their own people or to protect human rights.

The conclusion of this is that the US has very bad cards in the upcoming powergame with China. Instead of concentration on their nationalist isolational politics, the US should come back to their very own sources. So the US should join the EU as an equal partner and adopt the more efficient European legal system. I think they should urge minor European based countries like Canada or Australia to join. The combined of power of US, Europe and the others (1.5 Billion people 84 percent of world's economics). Could face the Asian challenge and win.

Re:I think that Communist China will overtake US.

[KoalaBear33]

I agree that China will take over the #1 spot in the future (but not in 20 years--more like 50 years). However, the advantage is not as big as you think. Consider the points you mentioned:

Population:

A lot of people seem to forget the downside of large populations. Large populations have increased social problems (my theory is that population ahd social issues are correlated in a non-linear manner). Things like crime, unemployment, famine, disease, etc are much more problematic with a large population. For instance, the biggest challenge facing China over the next 20 years will be figuring out what to do with the massive number of layed off workers due to elimination of government companies. There are millions of Chinese that are unemployed and flocking to the cities. These people's lives need to be considered. Possible side-effects of this problem include high crime, loss/decrease of worker rights, horrible sanitary conditions in cities... all the way to potential collapse of Communism itself. If Communism collapses, all these predictions will be moot...

Education system:

China actually has very good educational system--all so-called Communist countries do. Don't forget that USA isn't that much better. There are large numbers of Americans who cannot write properly (bad grammer, spelling, etc). There are many Americans who can't even do high-school math. At the rate that USA is going, these things will just get worse. I claim that social problems are non-linear and what this means here is that people who fell through the educational system will likely not emphasize school to their kids, and so on.

Traditions:

I don't think tradition really plays a role. I mean just look at Japan, which is very tradionalist--not that liberal at all. Yet it did well for the last few decades. Besides, what you are saying is contradictory. Capitalism rewards and requires greed, violence (to enforce authority or steal resources from other countries), ignorance of family values, etc. If anything, China will be worse off due to its traditions...

Resources:

Resources are meaningless under capitalism. All that matters is money--wealth! You can buy whatever you don't have, and if that doesn't work out invade countries and steal their resources. This is how USA has been going on for the last 50 years. USA consumes more than they can. Believe it or not, USA imports more than it exports with practically every country. Resources haven't played a role for USA, and it won't for China either. Remember: you can buy anything! Including human labour...

Legal bonds:

Not sure what to say here... I don't know how much this matters. From a socialist point of view, being open shifts the benefit to the population as a whole; capitalists, of course, argue that this is detrimental to innovation (eg. a capitalist would say that you can't have software development businesses in China because piracy is rampant). I guess it boils down to which side of the spectrum you are on.

Less restricted goverment:

If the govt has to spend less on social issues and in upholding human rights, it is actually a very negative thing. There have been more revolutions, overthrow of govt, etc due to social issues and human rights issues than anything else. People don't overthrow governments to gain freedom; they overthrow governments because they are discriminated against or are starving. If China skimps on social infrastructure/etc it won't last very long IMO.

Instead of concentration on their nationalist isolational politics, the US should come back to their very own sources.

USA has NOT been practicing isolationalism since WWII. They are not called an imperial power for nothing...

...the US should join the EU as an equal partner...

A superpower EQUAL to others? lol When have superpowers ever been concerned with others? If anything, USA wi

Re:I think that Communist China will overtake US.

[axxackall]

Education system: The US has a better starting position, but China is rapidly gaining. Chinese have thrown away all Mao anti-illectual rubbish and know to value knowledge these days.

I am working in several projects with Chinees programmers educated back in China. Also I am working with Indian, Russian, West-Europian and North American programmers. I would say that Chinees and Russian are the best. Well, Russians are smarter a bit and their eduction is often evn overkilling, but they are slow and they do not have any sense of a discipline (like artists, they write the code they haven't been asked and they forget to write the code they've been asked). Indian programmers are very fast and have extreme sense of discipline, but that hurts their creativity a lot, besides Indian education is not really good. North American programmers are slow, with no creativity and a very poor education (most of American programmers I know barely know elementary math calculus). Chinese and West-Europian programmers are fast, disciplined and well (optimally) educated.

Having said that I should add that Russian education is going down in its quality very rapidly. Europian ediaction keeps the same. North American education has no hope in any near time. Chinese and Indian education is growing. Thus, counting other logic (especially IP and patents) I think that China has a lot of future. All they need is to maintain a political stability by slowly giving up to their people more and more freedom, but doing it very slow (Soviet Union is collapsed b/c people receive too much of freedom rapidly at on time - too fast to egt using it properly).

Yes, it runs linux, but why?

[WegianWarrior]

None of the links I bothered to click on even touched - as far as my skimming of the articles revealed - anything about why the chinese has opted for a variation on Linux, instead of one of the commercial unixes, Wondows (yeah, right) or something along those lines. Does it adapt better to this scale? Is it because it's essentially free (as in 'no licenses')? If it the reds fear of a backdoor in the system if they buy a commercial product?

Don't get me wrong, a supercomputer running on Linux is cool and all that, but I would like to know more about the logic that dictates the choice of OS in such an application. Suggestions?

Export?

[1stflight]

I thought we weren't supposed to export supercomputing technologies to China? When did that change?

Re:Good?

[Progman2000]

The US hasn't performed live nuclear tests in quite a while (20 years?). There are two reasons why sims aren't enough: 1) They are based on theories that don't always match reality and 2) they cannot simulate *everything*.

Don't get me wrong, theories and simulations are great for preliminary work, but in the end you have to test it to be sure. On the wall over my monitor right now is a board from the Cray 1-S/1000, used at Kirtland AFB in 1980 for blast effects sims.

Besides, the world could use a good 10-30 megaton test every decade or so. It would give the media a chance to remind everyone just how dangerous and powerful they are. Good photo op, too. :)