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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."
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.
-- Adam
Seems it's a lot more complicated to build a network of 2000 boxes than it is to make a web page without broken img links (Link is from the c-net article)
cat
That's what the Three Gorges Dam was for all along. To cool this thing.
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?
No. The new supercomputer will run a Linus-designed Linux operating system...
Damn straight. And remeber its "Linus/Linux" not just "Linux". Give credit where its due.
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.
In one corner: Darl McBride, the SCO Group, and two dozen lawyers.
In the other corner: the People's Liberation Army.
Yeah, I'd pay to see that.
Maj. Kong
Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
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?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
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.
Population is more of a disadvantage than an advantage at this point. And "genius" isn't just a matter of statistics, it requires an environment that fosters it. Renaissance Venice didn't have a very high population.
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.
Unfortunately they've replaced the Maoist garbage with extremist nationalist garbage that is just as dangerous. And the extreme poverty that so much of China lives in drags down the education system. There are computer science departments in some area colleges that don't have, well, any computers.
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.
Confucianism isn't as strong as it once was, which is a good thing; it's a very nasty, hierarchical, heavily class-based system. Its adherence to family and social obligations also encourages nepotism and cronyism, which is one of the central reasons why so many third-world economies hit the ropes so easily.
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.
Well it sounds like you have a definite ideological bias there, but the diversity of viewpoints is an advantage, not a disadvantage (though the right inevitably tries to smear dissent as "unpatriotic", at least when they're in power).
Resources: China has many natural resources. Even more there are much resources in the neighboring countries.
China has a fair amount of resources due to it's sheer size, but they're missing some things (such as enough arable land).
These are very weak, so China has just to blackmail or to conquer them to get the resources.
Well I definitely disagree with this. China is actually surrounded by smaller, yet militarily stronger countries. India is weaker than China in terms of pure military power, but they do have nuclear weapons and would probably react to any incursion with them. Japan has a smaller military, but far more advanced, and would probably beat China even without US help. Taiwan also has a very small, but very high-tech military, and China's obsolete transports and air force would be cut down pretty quickly if they tried anything. Russia, even now, is no pushover, and has a stronger military and a larger nuclear arsenal if it came to that. The southeast side of the country is slightly less intimidating, but I don't even think the Chinese government will go near the psychopaths who run North Korea.
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.
Yes, but I don't think they have the economy to drive the science, even if they have the information. And to get the foreign investment they really crave they'll have to start cracking down on IP issues.
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.
True, which results in such things as the Three Gorges Dam. But a tyrannical government has no stability, as history has shown again and again.
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).
Less is more !
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.