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US Supercomputer Lead Sparks Russian Govt's Competitive Drive
CWmike writes "Russia's launch of Sputnik in 1957 triggered a crisis of confidence in the US that helped drive the creation of a space program. Now, Russia is comparing the US's achievements in supercomputing with theirs, and they don't like what they see. In a speech on Tuesday, Russia's President, Dmitry Medvedev, criticized his country's IT industry almost to the point of sarcasm for failing to develop supercomputing technology, and urged a dramatic change in Russia's use of high-performance computing. Medvedev, at the opening address of a Security Council Meeting on Supercomputers in Moscow, told attendees that 476 out of the 500 supercomputers on the Top500 list were manufactured in the United States. 'Therefore, in general, our situation is very difficult,' he said."
In Soviet Russia, you make supercomputers into Playstation 3!
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
Send some dudes to America with some cash and buy some nice computing equipment. Do you have some serious computing to do? Or do you have a serious need to build new computers?
Looks like Dmitry wants to play Crisis
With most of the work done in developing motherboards, stamping silicon, and exporting the machines done in China, Russia can buy their computers from the same source as the US.
Plus, with the advances in malware, why own a computercomputer when you can pwn it?
I thought Russia led in distributed node supercomputers (aka botnets). Shows what I know.
So what? Suddenly we have to start building supercomputers in Russia?
Lack of supercomputers means nobody needs them. That's an indication that Russia is falling behind in technology in general. You can't fix this just by building some supercomputers.
Something more fundamental must be done: fight corruption, establish rule of law, create infrustructure. Then the high-tech industry will emerge by itself. No need for the government to build supercomputers.
Imagine a beawulf cluster of these?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
The SR-71 blackbird was arguably the finest airplane ever built. Nothing before or since has ever matched it.
It was designed with nothing but a slide rule and paper.
Don't think these expensive toys are an adequate substitute for the human mind. Or for well trained engineers and mathemeticians.
From Medvedev's website:
"If we are talking seriously, a huge number of entrepreneurs, not to mention officials, do not know what supercomputers are: for them it is an exotic type of those machines that were created in the 1920s to catch up and overtake America."
1920s? What does he mean? Those machines Zhukov used for mathematical modeling, when he prepared for Khalkhin Gol?
"Mr. President, if I may speak freely, the Russkie talks big, but frankly, we think he's short of know how. I mean, you just can't expect a bunch of ignorant peons to understand a machine like some of our boys. And that's not meant as an insult, Mr. Ambassador, I mean, you take your average Russkie, we all know how much guts he's got. Hell, lookit look at all them them Nazis killed off and they still wouldn't quit."
- General "Buck" Turgidson
From chernenko@kremvax.UUCP Sun Apr 1 15:02:52 1984
Relay-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 (MC840302); site mcvax.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 4/1/84 (SU840401); site kremvax.UUCP
Path: mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko
From: chernenko@kremvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.general,eunet.general,net.politics,eunet.politics
Subject: USSR on Usenet
Message-ID:
Date: Sun, 1-Apr-84 15:02:52 GMT
Article-I.D.: kremvax.0001
Posted: Sun Apr 1 15:02:52 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 1-Apr-84 12:26:02 GMT
Organization: MIIA, Moscow
Lines: 41
Well, today, 840401, this is at last the Socialist Union of Soviet
Republics joining the Usenet network and saying hallo to everybody.
One reason for us to join this network has been to have a means of
having an open discussion forum with the American and European people
and making clear to them our strong efforts towards attaining peaceful
coexistence between the people of the Soviet Union and those of the
United States and Europe.
We have been informed that on this network many people have given strong
anti-Russian opinions, but we believe they have been misguided by their
leaders, especially the American administration, who is seeking for war
and domination of the world.
By well informing those people from our side we hope to have a possibility
to make clear to them our intentions and ideas.
Some of those in the Western world, who believe in the truth of what we
say have made possible our entry on this network; to them we are very
grateful. We hereby invite you to freely give your comments and opinions.
Here are the data for our backbone site:
Name: moskvax
Organization: Moscow Institute for International Affairs
Contact: K. Chernenko
Phone: +7 095 840401
Postal-Address: Moscow, Soviet Union
Electronic-Address: mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko
News: mcvax kremvax kgbvax
Mail: mcvax kremvax kgbvax
And now, let's open a flask of Vodka and have a drink on our entry on
this network. So:
NA ZDAROVJE!
-- ...{decvax,philabs}!mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko
K. Chernenko, Moscow, USSR
I thought Russia was focusing on botnets. Most of these have a lot more processing power than the fastest supercomputers.
"His name was James Damore."
476 out of the 500 supercomputers on the Top500 list were manufactured in the United States.
Yeah right! I don't think a single PC has been manufactured, assembled, and shipped from this country in which every component was dug out of the ground, refined, processed, manufactured, packaged, assembled, and distributed, from this country-- Not in a long time. That said, if Russia's so damned worried about our CPU designers, why not recruit a few? I know of at least one that quit the x86 development team from Intel muttering something about "not dealing with a unit of time smaller than a season" after having some nanosecond glitches in a core he was designing... He sounds like a guy who could use a stiff drink. I'm sure you can deliver, Russia.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If Medvenev offended with IT industry in Russia, he should stop corruption in his country which led money earned from oil and gas to be spent for luxury cars and buildings. If you visit Moscow all you could see expensive cars flooding around but technology in government is years old and not used efficiently. If they have money to buy those cars, they can buy or even produce those CPUs as well.
He should know that all talents of Russia and brains are going to EU countries and US once they find an option to be employed there for last decase. Still they have enough manpower and knowledge to build those but not enough politicians to drive this move.
The SR-71 blackbird was arguably the finest airplane ever built. Nothing before or since has ever matched it.
It was designed with nothing but a slide rule and paper.
Don't think these expensive toys are an adequate substitute for the human mind. Or for well trained engineers and mathemeticians.
Aw, c'mon. There are good reasons that the "stolen alien technology" meme has such staying power, and the SR-71 is one of the biggest. It was ridiculously far ahead of anything else we'd produced. Sure, it was the product of "the human mind", or at least A human mind, but I don't think lumping Kelly Johnson or Nikola Tesla or Leonardo da Vinci in with "the rest of humanity" is especially useful.
Whatever your level of skill and insight, though, supercomputing can act as a force multiplier for your brain. If you're claiming that real engineers only need a slide rule and paper, or that supercomputing will somehow get in the way of their natural gifts, well, I'm going to have to disagree.
Oh, and I probably shouldn't be mentioning this, but I've heard rumors that the military actually didn't stop developing newer and faster aircraft technologies after the Blackbird. But don't tell anyone.
I recall couple years ago Russia bought entire decommissioned Dresden AMD fab. Good luck competing using manufacturing processes of yesteryear.
It seems like the best product of their nanotech push so far are midget kremlin rulers with their delusion of grandeur.
And yes, I used to know something about semiconductor industry in ex-USSR
"Therefore, comrade generals, our situation is very difficult," he said.
There, fixed that for ya Comrade Medvedev. Three cheers for cold-war style rhetoric!!
It is difficult to break into existing industries and make a name for yourself. If Russia isn't already producing top supercomputers then they shouldn't necessarily try to as a matter of self-worth or nationalistic pride. India & China are trying to make inroads into the automobile markets, sure they are late in the game but they think their products have something unique to offer in the competitive marketplace. On the other hand, if I were a large world power with heavy computing needs, I wouldn't want to resort to purchasing necessary equipment manufactured by a former/current rival. Outside of a trust issue I have trouble understanding a need to homegrow supercomputers except out of pride.
Suddenly MikeZ tutorial is playing in my head
If you get a counter hit, you can do massive damage to the capitalist regime.
NOBODY IS SAFE FROM THE POWER OF SCIENCE!
Been playing way to much of it.
Thank you for your sale of Blue Gene/P to Russia.
Yours In Novosibirsk.
K. Trout
any idiot can put together computers...
So, why didn't Russia buy SGI earlier this year? Instant membership to the supercomputer club.
Plus, the chance to screw up the SGI logo yet again.
Who needs supercomputers when you've got million-node botnets?
For those of you that didn't RTFA, this is the bit that put Russia's problem into its proper perspective:
Contrary to popular misconception, Russia's economy doesn't just depend on oil and gas. It also depends on exporting weapons and other military equipment. For that country to maintain an advantage in the design, development, and manufacture of such military equipment, then they need to make more use of modern technology to do so.
This space left intentionally blank.
Russia already has some of the largest and most powerful cluster computers in the world! All he needs to do is look to the Russian mafia and their collections of zombified computers that they control worldwide!
"In Russia, th3 p4wned kl0wd z0mb13s 0wnz3d U!"
Whew! This water sure is cold!
I read it in Russian, so I do not know about the quality of this translation.
It sounded very convincing. What it has to do with supercomputers? Try to read the text. The answer is there.
I hate an arms-race as much as the next guy, but imagine if all the showmanship from whose nukepeen was bigger in the cold war could go towards supercomputing or fuel efficiency as the primary goal instead of a spin-off.
No cold war fear, just politicians whipping out their huge... processors... as part of a rallying call.
So, drop the gauntlet Medvedev, or e-trousers as the case may be.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
What are "Supercomputer Lead Sparks"? How are they affected by RoHS? ...I think my parser failed on the sentence after that point.
Bow-ties are cool.
Hmmm, reminds me when I was reading some singularity stuff, and they referenced a "hard" AI takeoff being driven by a rivalry between nations for hardware computing power to drive the birth of the first AI. I agree, it sounds really wacky (and there's a fairly high probability it is), but hell, this could be as important as fire, so I figure it's worth thinking about.
WTF do they want this computing power for, I wonder
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
... yeah, right.
Even a moderate load of smarts is enough to figure that it's cheaper to let someone else do the R&D the build a copy. Just look at pretty much all aircraft they've built and compare with ours.
Either this guy is ignorant to the point of incompetence, or he's just playing wag-the-weenie national ego games. They built stuff very much like ours when we were enemies. They're allies now.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I noticed that the speech was given at a Security Council meeting, yet nowhere in TFA did they mention anything about security. President Medvedev talked about building better airplanes but it seems he glossed over the security concerns.
It's an incredibly huge security issue for them. If our supercomputers spank their supercomputers, then we can decrypt their traffic but they cannot decrypt ours. They might as well just blog their state secrets in clear text.
Always consider what they're not saying. That's the really important stuff.
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
...or so they'd have us believe...
They should patent the advanced Windows Bot- Net technology, they beat Mickeysoft by decades.
Colossus to Guardian
2x1 = 2
Guardian to Colossus
What?
Does that install in the standard 5.25 bay?
Perhaps I'll get on myself when the prices come down and they stop "sparking".
First Putin's government pushed "GLONASS" system, an alternative to GPS. Oh, it still doesn't work and nobody expects it ever will.
Then, Putin's government pushes "Nanotechnologies" thingy, which brings as many results as "glonass" push and becomes one of the popular jokes.
They also push for "brand new" and "deadly as hell" "Bulava" rocket, which keeps exploding "because of sabotage" and because, "when so many factories are involved in producing it, it's absolutelly impossible to control it's quality" (not a joke, they've really said that)
Last, but, not least, russian government decides to dethrone USA as "supercomputers creator", by creating "supercomputers" using CPUs produced by US companies.
Very strong weeds smoke they...
Vote parent up. There's a pattern emerging here. It's what a lot of corporate types call an "inability to execute".
Could be that all these grandiose-but-ultimately-fruitless hare brained schemes are actually a symptom of a more serious underlying malady: a very low self-esteem in the Russian political establishment. This manifests itself in bullying countries in their near abroad, and 19th-century style political posturing when that they REALLY need to do, is knuckle down and do the unglamourous grunt work of building the foundations of future prosperity. Like properly guaranteeing the rule of law for everybody, and not just selectively enforcing the law when it suits the "power vertical"; real political pluralism, independent judiciary, and a thorough and wide ranging crackdown on corruption.