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."

Comments

Hrmm

[acehole]

So what happened to that dragon cpu chip they were working on?

Use?

[IANAL(BIAILS)]

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?

Re:Use?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

I don't believe the post to which you supplied said anything about the United States. Rather, it speculated that the new supercomputer would be used for nuclear weapons.

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...

Re:Use?

[mslinux]

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

Re:Use?

[tehanu]

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?

Re:Use?

[jsebrech]

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.

While that is pretty fast...

[Digitus1337]

I think maybe we should hold off on asking it "why 42?"

Worlds fastest internet filter

[ReeferCpe]

This is probably the intended use :)

Re:Interesting

[acxr is wasted]

If they could just smooth over the human rights people

As you can see, this is nothing new for China.

But why on earth

[caston]

Would the Chinese need a computer capable of running Longhorn?

Oh well, More power to them!

Use?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

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?

i see...

[abscondment]

The computer's being created by Dawning Information Industry Co. (US Site).

According to their company profile,

Dawning is the unique Chinese high-tech company which can manufacture not only low end PC server worth $1,200 but also high end MPP system worth millions USD.

They seem to serve a lot of different customers, but I have a feeling the government will be making use of this baby.

Re:Why 800's?

[JJJ_NL]

400 don't exist. There are only 1xx, 2xx and 8xx.

Re:Interesting

[turgid]

Since when does "exceedingly liberal"==Communist?

w00t!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the chinese can caluclate how many communists it really takes to screw in a lightbulb....

(my estimate is the entire chinese population, because if only one person screws it in, then that's just not sharing with others, is it?)

China to Crack Supercomputer Top Ten List

[c]

Man, I can't stand it when that list goes down from beeing hax0red...

Re:Interesting

[tehanu]

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.

Re:Interesting

[john82]

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).

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 ... for everything.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

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....

Re:USA?

[chamblah]

Does anyone know what the list of top 10 is?

Here is the current list of 500, last updated in November of '03.

Top 10 Summary

[thakadu]

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)

Re:I wonder what kneejerk reaction

[aardvarkjoe]

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.