Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
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
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
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....
Whether or not the reason for building a supercomputer was political, the use is scientific. I think that we can use as many political excuses as possible to fund science.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.