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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."
It is official; Drudge confirms: Reagan is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered GOP community when Drudge confirmed that Reagan's life span has dropped yet again, now down to less than a few days. Coming on the heels of recent GOP problems which plainly state that the GOP have lost more popularity, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The GOP is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by Reagan falling dead soon.
You don't need to be a Joan Quigley to predict Reagan's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Reagan faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Reagan because Reagan is dying. Things are looking very bad for Reagan. As many of us are already aware, Reagan continues to lose life. Red blood flows like a river of blood.
President Ronald Reagan is the most endangered of them all, having lived for 93 years. The sudden and unpleasant departures of his mind only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Reagan is dying.
Well, why should the United States be the sole keeper of Weapons of Mass Destruction? History has shown that we aren't exactly the most trustworthy of these things. Just exactly what do you suppose they are developing at Fort Mead? Vaccines to save the world?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Since when does "exceedingly liberal"==Communist?
Stick Men
will happen from our politicians in the US. My understanding is that the new cluster being built at Oak Ridge is really intended to somewhat compete with the Earth Simulator cluster in Japan. Granted, I don't think it is intended to surpass it but still I just get the feeling that a lot of the supercomputer projects being supported by Congress are political in nature and not really scientific. Now that the Chinese will possibly enter the top 10, that should get the politicos all riled up.
And I said, who are we (yes, not all Slashdotters are from the US, but most / many are in fact from the US) to tell China what to do with their supercomputer? Kettle, black, glass houses, and so forth...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
at least they are free of Warcrimes unlike the USA (no matter how much rummy bleats)
do you see how much damage the current administration has done ?, human rights violations by USA was 5 years ago unthinkable, now they are in the same club as those "communist" countries, nice company
the damage done to USA's credibility will take 100's of years to repair , look how long slavery took. you lost the terrorists won and what was a free country has become a facist theocracy that tortures, murders and treats humans with contempt
that my friends what is going to be written into history
It will be used to calculate, measure and to build mathematical models... like all super-computers. It's just a tool, what exactly they decide to calculate isn't important.
Math is agnostic, it doesn't care if one is attempting to measure the fallout radius of a hydrogen bomb or what percentage of the earth's surface is water.
"If you can measure what you speak of and express it by a number, you know something about your subject; but if you cannot, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory." --Kelvin
extreme liberalism would be libertarians, communist implies authoriatian.
"China was never really communist, and they aren't even playing at it anymore."
And this, to a large degree, where the Sino-Soviet split came from. While the Soviet Union claimed that it had already gotten past capitalism and was now working from socialism to communism, China never made this claim. Ideologically, they claimed that class struggle was to continue in China and that there would be a ruling class and an antagonistic serving class, which the Soviet Union claimed was impossible after revolution. This difference in ideologies allowed China to carry out a lot of "capitalist" reform by simply pointing out to their notion that, until the world-economy was a socialsit one, it was futile to try not to be capitalist in some senses.
Huh? How the heck has history shown we're an untrustworthy keeper of these things? The fact that we used two to avert an extremely costly and bloody land invasion of the Japanese home island?
I don't seem to recall us using them on our own people or at the drop of a hat even when things turned for the worse in Vietnam.
I *do* recall the simple existence of them preventing war with the USSR and in the end, being partly responsible for the fall of that country when it couldn't keep up...
Sheesh...
China keeps showing more and more signs that it wants to be a big player in the world despite being communist. If they could just smooth over the human rights people (I suppose they should actually improve the human rights thing in general), they could very well become a very important figure in the world economy (not that they're not already).
... for everything.
China has the largest population on the planet with 1.3+ Billion people. The USA, including all states, protectorates, territories and New Jersey, is not quite 300 million (2000 census). That would make China four times the size in population. But you don't think they're very important.
News Flash: With only the most minor of exceptions, the governments of the world obviously don't care about China's human rights policies. Even the US, under the Clinton administration, gave in. Why? Because China already IS an economic power.
Do you stand in front of mountain and insist that it come to you? Think of economic power in terms of kinetic energy. KE = 0.5 * mass * velocity^2. Right now, China's economy doesn't have much velocity, but it sure as hell has mass. Let's apply that to the most fundamental priciple of economics: Supply and Demand. When demand rises while supply stays the same or goes down, price rises. China is untapped demand potential. That demand potential is unmatched. And as that demand changes from potential to realized, we'll all pay more
at least they are free of Warcrimes unlike the USA
Sure, why go to war when you have a billion of your own people to slaughter brutally?
There are no absolutes in this game, but you can't say that China is better than the US, just because they don't have a few very horrible incidents that are currently blown up in the media.
US is considered a resonable country, human rights wise. China is not even close to that yet. Yes, getting better, but it is still only 15 years ago the military opened fire on civilians in the centre of Beijing.
So, really, you need to take your anonymous self-rightious preaching elsewhere.
The US doesn't want to annex its nearest neighbor by force or failing that, bomb them into submission.
Iraq.
The US isn't propping up Stalinist dictatorships that want nukes.
G. W. Bush already has nukes, and is working on taking all your freedoms. And how many "Stalinist dictatorships" has the U.S. put in power over the years? Castro? Sadam (sp?)?
The US has more than one political party.
Two is not much bigger than one. How different are they really? They are mostly the same except for a few distinguishing details. If a third party wanted to run, how long would it take for them to have a realistic shot?
The US doesn't arrest people in peaceful demonstrations and stick them in prison camps for 10 years at a time.
Prisoners from Afganistan. These are classified as "non-combatants" by the U.S. government. They are held with no trial, and are not POWs. And let's not forget about "free Kevin," held for (was it) 4 years without trial, and the only reason that he got out was because he agreed to a plea bargain imposed by the prosecutor.
The US doesn't think it owns Tibet.
Iraq.
The US doesn't tell the religious to register with the state or else.
Any of the government databases that track "undesirables"; members of the comunist party (or is that still illegal?), people of mid-east descent....
I take it china's no longer on the list of countries we're not allowed to sell supercomputers too.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If only that were true. On the scale of bad things that people do to one another, the Abu Ghraib incidents are such small potatoes that, 10 years from now, you won't be able to find any significant number of people who'll cite the Abu Ghraib torture as even one of the top ten reasons they hate the US.
As for the UN, it's hard to take anything they say seriously when they selected Libya to chair the United Nations Commission on Human Rights...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Huh? How the heck has history shown we're an untrustworthy keeper of these things? The fact that we used two to avert an extremely costly and bloody land invasion of the Japanese home island?
The use of nuclear weapons on hiroshima and nagasaki was tactically unnecessary, it did not decide the war, it only speeded up the ending of it. Especially the second bomb was unnecessary, since the japanese had gotten the message after the first one.
They could have also dropped the bombs on low-populated areas, but instead they dropped it on civilian cities, knowing full well that the destruction and loss of human life would be massive. And they dropped them without warning, to make sure loss of civilian life would be maximized.
This massive civilian massacre was a constant factor in WWII-era allied campaigns. Japan and Germany saw constant nighttime firebombing in the later stages of the war, designed to kill as much civilians as possible to destroy enemy morale. Ofcourse, since the allied forces won, the history books were written in such a way as to obfuscate this fact.
I *do* recall the simple existence of them preventing war with the USSR and in the end, being partly responsible for the fall of that country when it couldn't keep up...
Exactly. What kept the cold war from becoming hot was the fact that both sides had nuclear weapons. That's the theory of nuclear detente: if everyone has them, no one can use them.
Seriously though, most countries don't have a very clean record, including China. Being involved in so many conflicts around the world, the US is hardly at the bottom of the barrel despite some incidents. What's really hurt the US is that they've been sanctimonious.
Being a thug and silently suppressing that is in many ways better than being a thug and claiming to be a saint. That's what hit the US full force. Compared to most countries of the world, the US is still a quite civilized one. But I don't think it'll ever regain the position as the "shining beacon of freedom and democracy" it once was.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Tu quoque. The fact that the US possesses and actively researches WMDs does not mean we can't criticize other countries who do. Even discounting different situations (dictatorship getting nukes vs. democracy getting nukes), at worst it only means that we are unable to live up to our own moral standards. It doesn't mean that our moral standards are invalid or that our criticisms are inappropriate.
Chinese empire's claim over their existing neighbors like Tibet, and the dozens of already subjugated and assimilated "minority nationalities" is based on such historically perverse ideology which its "modern" communist party dictators have never really denounced and instead made it into a nationalist policy. Instead of waving your fist at others you should be trying to help the chinese people grow up and rid yourselves of those corrupt communist cronies and then pull your armies back into your own country so your neighbors could resume their lives in peace and dignity again.