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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."
So what happened to that dragon cpu chip they were working on?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
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).
I know people refer to the United States as the world's only superpower? But why is that? What makes a superpower?
In some other ways, seems like China has gone from exceedingly liberal (Communist) to more moderate, while the US is still that funny mix of liberal and right wing type of ideas.
I glanced through the article quickly and I see that it doesn't mention what use the computer will be put to. For some reason, I doubt it will be used to model climate change... bets they want to use the cycles to crunch some nuclear weapons simulations?
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.
I am glad china is investing money in technology. With all the people they have living there, they could become a major technolohy hub. Look at what Japan did in the 1980's with manufacturing. Imagine all the cheap(er) products we could have on the market. It all starts with R&D. Even the old "star wars" spending from the 1980's has proven useful in new products in ways not imagined back then.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
You meant at JERUSALEM? Gaza? They surely are working harder than their American friends at Iraq.
Is it really a chinese super computer? Its made from AMD chips.
Thats like saying "We built the fastest American sports car by putting 600 ferrari engines in a buick"
Some spooks and US special forces and their allies, the "northern alliance" opium growers, killed 3,000 prisoners of war in afghanistan by locking them in almost air tight shipping containers and leaving them sit in the hot sun for days, then machine gunned whomever lived through it. It's on google, you can go find it yourself. There's some war crimes researchers investigating it now, digging up the mass graves, etc.
If you really look, you can find a long string of abuses by the US military going all the way back to the civil war, including all the outright genocide committed on the Indians here.
Their hands are just as dirty as anyone elses. Perhaps you have never heard the term "free fire zone"? Go find some actual nam combat vets and talk to them off the record, Hardly any of them WON'T have abuse/rape/torture stories. You might even see pictures, millions of them were taken and brought back to the US. Of course, in public or on the net on forums you won't read it much,because guys just don't freely admit to raping 12 year old girls or shooting prisoners or throwing them out of helicopters or dropping willie peter on tied up groups of prisoners,because they are all middle aged now with kids in colege and are local "respectable" business people and etc, but in meatspace if you talk to a lot of them,like I said, off the record, you'll hear some quite interesting stories. Combat and warzones are never john wayne-ish, that does not exist in real life. And it's the same with brit troops, french, russians, aussies, you name it. Warcrimes are NOT rare, or "confined to a few bad apples", and they never have been. There have been a lot of them committed in iraq so far, you'll just have to admit it, the evidence is overwhelming. The red cross already estimates the number of civilian deaths to be in the thousands, so I don't know how much has to occur before it's classed as a war crime.
As to china, if it was up to me, we would have never traded so much as a pair of chopsticks with those goons. They killed millions of their own people, they still run concentration camps, and the same political criminal gang is still in charge. I blame kissinger and nixon for starting the ball rolling on legitimizing that criminal empire, and I think it sucks we have outr economy tied to them, and that western profiteers in suits are bending over backwards to make that police state and military even more powerful. I will predict that within 10 years we will be at war with them, because at that time their population pressures and thirst for oil and more sources of other raw materials will force them to expand outwards, and we just might not be strong enough to stop them without annihilating the entire planet.
It sucks, I was against "normalization" with china without quid pro quos of them opening themselves up to normal freedoms and normal political process. All we have done is enrich china at the full expense of the US middle class, we traded cheap trinkets at walmart to build up the political party and war machine of a nation that has already killed more of it's own people then were killed in all of ww2. They are goons, I hope their people finally get hip and revolt against those goons.
And I hope we can eventually get rid of the democrat and republican parties inside this nation as well, two of the most corrupt organizations to ever have been created. We don't have any sort of "representative republic" unless you happen to be a billionaire internationalist. The vote is a joke,it's hijacked now, the appointed judges are all hand picked criminal gang members. The big time mass media is run by international profiteers aligned with the various war machines. they sit on each others boards of directors, slurping up the proofits, and the media helps keep people brainwashed. I mean, really, how can any honest journalist even use the term "detainee" without giggling? It's such a doublespeak farce.
No one in the US has anything righteous to be proud of any more, we suck as bad as any other bogus dictato
It would not suprise me in the lest to find out that the NSA always maintains a supercomputer al least 2x as fast as the fastest "publically" listed supercomputer.