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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?
Bragging rights? China beats IBM, we can no longer say that we're the most technologically advanced country and that's what I want. If that happens, maybe we'll get a boost in science education like post-Sputnik.
What does the winner win?
The best and brightest immigrants?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
If they're worried about China advancing in computer technology, maybe they shouldn't build research labs there!
Let me translate IBM's statement into a more sincere, less carefully spun, form, and you'll see why an uncaring profit-maximizing multinational is wrapping itself in the flag:
PR: "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.'"
Translation: "But now, an IBM lobbyist has said to a Washington, DC forum 'Other countries are doling out sweetheart contracts to manufacturers and designers of expensive computers. Give us a giant pile of money or the chinks win."
Ah, but they may get some coveted welfare, I mean, defense spending out of this, so that's a possible reason for it.
SSC
Well duh! We need that kind of compute power to keep track of the debt.
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.
What planet do you live on??
AccountKiller
IBM is entitled to all the handouts they want - it's only the unemployed and welfare mothers that aren't entitled to handouts. Christ are you some kind of socialist?
IBM is not an American company. They've said so repeatedly, every time they been asked about all the thousands of jobs they've off-shored.
What they ARE, though, is a large multi-national trying to stir up fear and pseudo-patriotism in the hopes of snagging huge, profitable government contracts for projects to build things we really don't need right now.
You do know that Intel's biggest, best, and newest research center is in China, right? Also production facilities, I believe. Bet there are stipulations on where the processors are made if they go Intel.
But more importantly, there are reasons to have such big computers and it isn't bragging rights. That's what the managers use to measure by and get their bonuses, but the real value in a super is what you can calculate with it.
As they get more powerful, you can quit doing various approximations and do real calculations. Your simulations get more accurate. You can also do those simulations quicker and do more of them as you explore optimization strategies. While these computers are expensive, being able to trim years or decades off of research programs pays back many times more in first to market, market dominance, etc.
You can do things in simulations that aren't even practical or even feasible in real life. Depending on the problem, it can be that you cannot even simulate it at all without a computer of such a scale.
One thing to keep in mind is that the researchers who use these things, when they get more power, generally are able to make pretty amazing new discoveries. For anyone using these, the advantages are obvious. And so are the opportunites if they can get their hands on even more computing power.
The quest for more computing power is in no way simply a bragging rights kind of thing. There are huge advantages to being able to run on the fastest computer in the world.
The huge debts that sovereign nations tend to rack up trigger the same moral instincts that petty consumer debt does; but it isn't at all clear that they work anything like the same way, economically.
It should be clear and obvious they don't work the same way. After all, the US owes China in US dollars, not Euros, not RMB.
So it's more like an amusement park owing suppliers massive debts payable in amusement park tokens (except amusement park tokens cost more to make than "electronic" US dollars).
Or like you owing trillions in fuzzyfuzzyfungus dollars. You can create as many as you need. Sure the smart ones may never lend you money again, but maybe the smart ones wouldn't have lent you trillions payable in fuzzyfuzzyfungus dollars right? So the dumb ones might actually say "thank you!" when you go up to them and repay them :).
As long as the dollar remains the main currency used to trade oil and other commodities, the USA gets a cheap/free ride. The people who keep saying "the USA would be better off with the gold standard" should consider this and other important factors :).
It's not that simple. If the USA did print enough dollars to repay the debt to China, then it would seriously inflate the dollar. That would make other people very wary about holding debts in dollars (although it would make a lot of third-world countries happy - they'd be able to repay their debts easily all of a sudden), and the USA would find it very difficult to borrow in the future, which would affect infrastructure. It would also affect the purchasing power of the average American, meaning that the cost of all imported goods would go up (in dollar terms), not just those from China. Anticipation of the last step is why a lot of large companies are trying hard to build markets in the EU, India and Russia - they don't want to be hit when Americans can't afford their products anymore.
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