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China to Crack Supercomputer Top Ten List
jsse writes "ComputerWorld (Hong Kong) has an article about Chinese Academy of Sciences building a supercomputer which has been shown in benchmark tests to process up to 10 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) and is expected to take a spot on the list of the world's ten most powerful supercomputers for the first time. The computer is a cluster of 2,560 Opteron 800 series processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) contained in 640 nodes of four processors each. AMD has announced the project last year when the cluster was building."
The computer's being created by Dawning Information Industry Co. (US Site).
According to their company profile,
They seem to serve a lot of different customers, but I have a feeling the government will be making use of this baby.
400 don't exist. There are only 1xx, 2xx and 8xx.
Human rights issues seem less important than the resources a country has.
A superpower state is powerful enough to influence events throughout the world.
I think due to the redefinition of superpower as "United States as the world's only superpower", it probably refers to the ability to forcefully remove sovereignty and control resources, to conduct human rights abuses of its own with impunity. In other words, they are not answerable to anyone.
China was never really communist, and they aren't even playing at it anymore. Witness the recent vote by the parliment to reinstate private property rights and which gives some basic human rights back to the people. China is already such a huge economic engine that it has raised world steel prices by between 50 and 100% since the beginning of this year. Other metals such as Zinc have seen nearly 200% rises! The scary part for the developed countries is that concievably China could grow at this rate for 100 years and still not have their entire population up to our current standard of living!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The best part is that in Australia, the "Liberal" party is the mainstream *conservative* ie. right-wing party. John Howard our PM, who is ideological and personal best buddies with your President Bush (eg. he just banned gay marriage) is the leader of the Liberal party. Which I think just blows the contention that liberal==left-wing.
The US does a lot of nuclear weapon simulations as well. So does France and any other country with nuclear weapon capability. I imagine the US is doing even more now as it is developing new types of mini-nukes which the government is seriously talking about deploying in conventional warfare. So if you want to cast stones...
Anyway, one idea is that the more computer simulations you do, the fewer real tests you have to do. So increased computer simulations may be beneficial for the minorities and rural Han Chinese living in the remote areas that they do the tests in. Of course it would be best to reduce development on nuclear weapons entirely but I don't see that happening in the present climate anytime soon. When even the leader of the free world is out there advocating the development of new nuclear weapons and uses loopholes in treaties to develop them, what exactly do you think the leaders of the paranoid and not-so-free world will do?
Look at top500.org
There is a new list comming the next few weeks.
Your 7-8 pentiums alone could do some useful stuff as a cluster. Not much, but a little. A compile farm COULD be possible (never done it, so i dont know, but if they have enough ram why not, as long as you have a better machine to do the linking/ect)
But adding them to an existing cluster of faster machines would slow the whole stuff down (more communication cost lowering the total efficiency more than outweights the computing power of the new nodes).
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Here is the current list of 500, last updated in November of '03.
*AHEM* Tibet *AHEM*.
You also might want to read up on the Chinese treatment of POWs during the Korean Conflict. Made the Iraqi prison look like a Sunday School.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Several errors in your post I would like to point out:
I wonder how many of the top 10 supercomputers are in the USA, and how the Virginia Tech G4 cluster ranks.
It's a G5 cluster first of all, and it ranks third(IIRC the biology department wants to use it)
Also, a side note. How much extra computing "power" is gained by adding an extra machine to a cluster? For example, I have about 7 or 8 pentiums (most are 166's, there is a 133 and a 200) sitting on the floor collecting dust. If I hooked them all up together, what would the usefulness be? Could I compile programs quicker? Would a cluster make a good web server, jps server? I know my PIII500 can drag with tomcat at times when crunching jsp.
That all depends on what you want to do, and what your communication speed is. If it takes more time to send the data off somewhere, have it computed by your slowest machine, then to have it sent back than it would just to compute it with your fastest machine, you lost time. For applications, you *could* compile faster(Apple has distributed builds with Rendezvous and XCode, they aren't the only ones who are doing it, but something to check out if you are interested). Also, certain applications distribute and scale well, other ones don't. That is probably why there will always be room for Cray and co.
Look at what Japan did in the 1980's with manufacturing.
Read up a little on the subject here Japan's manufacturing revolution began well before the 80's..
The countries from top 10 are: 1. Japan 2. USA 3. USA 4. USA 5. USA 6. USA 7. USA 8. USA 9. USA 10. USA and the top 10 countries in the list with (highest rank) are: 1. Japan (1) 2. USA (2) 3. China (14) 4. France (15) 5. UK (16) 6. South Korea (22) 7. Canada (29) 8. Germany (31) 9. Netherlands (41) 10. New Zealand (44)
Depends on how big the cluster already is. Are you adding one machine to a cluster of 6, or a cluster of 600?
For example, I have about 7 or 8 pentiums (most are 166's, there is a 133 and a 200) sitting on the floor collecting dust. If I hooked them all up together, what would the usefulness be?
Practically none. Buy a single 2.4GHZ Celeron box off eBay for $200 and you'll get nore out of it.
Could I compile programs quicker?
No. Clusters are only good for doing tasks that "parallelize". Compiling is too linear. Besides, it's not like you hook up 8 machines to a 10/100 switch, start up a few "cluster daemons", and end up with a single virtual machine. Clustering generally requires software customized for the specific class of task you wish to tackle.
Would a cluster make a good web server, jps server?
You can have multiple machines serving the same web content, but that's not really clustering, per se. That's just load balancing.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The US has had some 32(+) 'broken arrows' - or times that it has lost nuclear weaposn - literally, _LOST_.
The only other country this has happened to it Russia.
You are untrustworthy.
Since when does "exceedingly liberal"==Communist?
Since when we now strike first for peace.
Since when our oldest international ally (France) became our biggest enemy.
Since when disagreeing with your government makes you a traitor.
Since one old sarin gas shell becomes a nation killer... and proof of WMD.
And especially since the media has become "fair and balanced."
Or the short answer:
Since when does "exceedingly liberal"==Communist?
Oh, about since late November 2004.
Clusters are only good for doing tasks that "parallelize". Compiling is too linear.
Linking is linear; you could compile C in as many parallel tasks as you have source files. Java compiles can be parellelized quite a bit too, particularly if your code makes heavy use of Class.forName(). I do this a lot, tho' quite gratuitously; I've got 4 CPUs so I use 'em, but with the size of projects I work on and the speed of even a single processor and a modern javac, it doesn't really make a vast amount of difference at the end of the day.
Well, just so you know, the silicon AMD uses comes from France (yes, all of it) and the Opterons are built (not assembled: built, from the ground up) in Germany. A lot of AMD's physical design work is done in Germany too.
;)
Looks like they put those 600 ferrari engines in a BMW!