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IBM Warns of China Closing the Supercomputer Gap
eldavojohn writes "China is digging a massive hole to house a computer building with the intent of usurping the United States' lead in the field of supercomputing, claims IBM. As of earlier this year, Oak Ridge Lab was beating China's Shenzhen Center. But now, an IBM representative has said to a Washington, DC forum, 'You have sovereign nations making material investments of a tremendous magnitude to basically eat our lunch, eat our collective lunch.' China has long been a contender in this regard, and Europe and Japan have similar goals to build an exascale supercomputer. To achieve this by 2020, the US will need to focus on 'co-design,' where hardware is developed in tandem with every other aspect of the computer, from applications down to optics. This isn't the first time a 'space race' style supercomputing push has been spurred by international competitiveness."
So everyone's trying to make a big, fast computer.
What's at stake? What does the winner win?
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Apparently there is nothing new under the Sun. The reader of this PR to help IBM sell more of their HPC machines should read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap first.
Those countries are sending their best and brightest to US universities to learn. Last I looked, they take the same classes as Americans - at least the Americans who are still studying that stuff.
When you offshore R&D to other countries, you spread knowledge around faster.
Why do I get the feeling the IBM is setting themselves up to receive Government handouts.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
In other words, IBM wants the government to give them lots of cash so they can ship more jobs over to India.
I understand IBM did some nice marketing in the "HPC is for Chess" area, but "surprise!": real world HPC is not used for chess playing.
It's for serious research, nowadays mostly nukes (design stuff to go BOOM) and flow modelation (climate research, stealth research, building better cars,planes and other machines), biochemistry (genetic engineering), cryptography and probably dozens of others things.
If they're worried about China advancing in computer technology, maybe they shouldn't build research labs there!
Really, since when does IBM care about what happens in the U.S.? Aren't they the same company that recently told some of their top researchers that they could either move to China, Poland, or a couple of other countries on their own dime and work for 'local wages' or be out of a job?
Nerd Wars going global. I don't see any other explanation.
Remember the missile gap cries before then? "We can only kill them ten times over; they can kill us 11 times over! We need to close the missile gap!"
SSC
(sigh)
Low taxes do NOT mean low government revenue. The US government pulled in more money AFTER Bush's tax cuts than any time in history. (unfortunately, they spent even more, but that's a different story)
From USA Today, Feb 12, 2007:
The continued strong growth in revenues reflects the record profits corporations have been recording in recent years and low levels of unemployment, which means more Americans are working and paying taxes.
(It's amazing how short our memories are. All I hear about today is how bad the economy was under Bush, yet from 2003-2007, we were booming, but no one care remember anything more than 2 years back)
See: Laffer Curve.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
This is the same company that sold most of it's commodity hardware business to Red China. The same company that's heavily investing in research... in China and India. The same company that continued to sell the Nazi's computing hardware used against allied forces and for managing the Holocaust via their their Brazilian unit. IBM has had a long history of selling out America in order to maximize profits.
(It's amazing how short our memories are. All I hear about today is how bad the economy was under Bush, yet from 2003-2007, we were booming, but no one care remember anything more than 2 years back)
It's also convenient to forget that in 2007, the Democrats took control of Congress, and that things really went south afterward. The Executive Branch has a lot of power (and perhaps more than originally intended), but legislation originates in the House of Representatives. Nothing substantial can occur without their approval.
Is there truly a direct cause-effect relationship, with no time lag? I don't think so. But, if one is going to blame the Bush administration for everything that occurred under its watch and (so far) two years later, then one has to also acknowledge that the Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress for the past 4 years.
Unilateral disarmement never works. If the other side wants to compete you can either compete or forfit. There are no other options. You might think you can choose to sit out, but there is no material difference between that and forfitting.
In theory, the USA has the greatest potential because (historically) you have had self-directed businesses that can rely on the stock market for capitialization and low taxes and low regulatory hurdles so a business can put incredible resources behind something that makes sense. There are plenty of examples of this happening where the government has stood aside while businesses gathered the capital and manpower to do really big things.
There was no government-financed support for transistors, lasers, integrated circuits or anything that led to the technology boom from 1950 to 1980 or so.
Where we are today is that everyone is looking to the government for direction and support. Solar power isn't practical on a large scale without massive government subsidies, so there are few businesses involved in this and some of the ones that are are pure scam. Electric cars might have a future, but there are so many regulations in place now that it is very difficult to manufacture anything involving those nasty things called "chemicals" that might get loose and destroy the environment - so other countries are building battery manufacturing plants and are fully prepared to sell the USA better, cheaper batteries while we fuss around. The result will be their batteries will always be better and cheaper.
The US Government is pretty much at the point of saying that China can have bigger, better, faster supercomputers because we will have bigger, better and likely more ponderous social support programs. The result will be a continuing slide towards 30-40% unemployment (we're at 20% now) and everything being made outside the USA. Hopefully, there will be plenty of jobs parking cars for foreign executives who come here to dictate terms.
In America, our capitalists insist that the individual's (i.e., their own) interests come before the state's and the people's, and anything that they do is justified by the profit motive even if it should hurt America. In China, capitalism is used as a motivational tool to benefit the state - with the constraint that hurting the state will result in your being gifted with some of that uniquely Chinese jewelry: A bullet behind the ear.
Put another way, decades of observation of America taught China that you cannot depend upon "enlightened self-interest" or "their responsibility to shareholders" to keep humans motivated by greed on the high road, but if you shoot those who drift off the road you've chosen, you don't need sidewalks.
Put another way, China weaponized trade and used American greed against us. And now such as IBM wish to complain about the consequences of their eagerness to be fabulously wealthy victims? Who built Lenovo? Little green men from Mars?
Put another way, IBM whining about China investing in making them obsolete after a decade or two of IBM trying to make technology jobs in America obsolete is not American capitalism, it is American greed - and all that we have left.
Put another way, America herds cats, while China trains a tiger.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Well, what if we just fixed our defense spending to twice that of our nearest competitor? That would be a 2/3 reduction from where we are now.