Slashdot Mirror
China Makes World's Fastest Supercomputer
shmG writes "China has replaced the United States as the maker of the world's fastest supercomputer. A Chinese research center has made the world's faster super computer — named as Tianhe-1A, which was released at a national conference on high-performance computers (HPC) in China. Made at a cost of over $88 million, Tianhe-1A is theoretically able to do more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second (one petaflop) at peak speed. Tianhe-1A 's peak performance reaches 1.206 petaflops, and it runs at 563.1 teraflops (1,000 teraflops is equal to one petaflop) on the Linpack benchmark."
But does it run (Red Flag) Linux?
I bet they used Doped Transistors ;)
Using an army of cheap, disposable labor. The microprocessors, of course.
Maybe this is the bitch-slapping the US needs to pull it's head out of it's ass, and start doing the things it needs to do to be seriously competitive again.
Meh. Who am I kidding?
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
The time for "supercomputers" is long past. This is just muscle-play that does not mean anything. The fetish of having a "supercomputer" seems to be a left-over from the times when computers were very slow and almost nobody had one. Or maybe politicians (and journalists) are still living in those times...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Me Chinese, me play joke, me put petaflop in, er, wait that doesn't work so well...
It's hard to get too excited about technological advances in a country that aggressively steals from the US, Japan, Europe and anybody else that has technology that they think would be nice to have.
It reminds me of the announcement of a new Chinese submarine a while back, where the critical technology had been stolen from the US through espionage.
If it turns out they made this system honestly, then I'll gladly congratulate them. However, their record on intellectual integrity so far is pretty dismal.
And the fastest social and economic downturn is in America...coincidence?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Boy, what did they copy now...
Finally they will be able to computerize the national census procedures.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I mean, who ever expected that Skynet would speak Chinese?
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
After observing Red Flag, Loongson, and the basic nature of Chinese hardware, I predict we're going to shortly see an "oh wait, they were lying, it's 200 teraflops of American hardware" come down the pipe.
I wouldn't mind being wrong, though.
Oak Ridge (Jaguar):
Cores Rmax(GFlops) Rpeak(GFlops) Nmax Nhalf
224162 1759000 2331000 5474272 0
Seems faster by a good margin.
The slashdot summary has the wrong numbers. The actual article which slashdot quotes is contradictory. Its starts by saying:
"Tianhe-1A has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the Linpack benchmark, making it the fastest system in China and in the world today."
and then one paragraph later it gives the same numbers as the slashdot summary.
Other articles (from other sites) are claiming theoretical peak performance of 4 Petaflops (from an Nvidia source) and sustained petaflops of 2.5.
So apparently all it takes to make a "supercomputer" now is lots and lots of money. Just go to Newegg and order that dual socket xeon dream machine you have in your cart. Then order 14,000 more of them.
From TFA: ... Tianhe-1A is theorectically able to do more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second(one petaflop) at peak speed. Tianhe-1A's peak performance reaches 1.206 petaflops...
"... Tianhe-1A has set a new performance record of 2.507 pataflops, as mesured by the Linpack benchmark
So does it do 1, 1.206 or 2.507 petaflops ?
There is absolutely no consistency in numbers in this story. Some measurements show this computer to be about 45% slower than the Cray XT5 and some show it to be faster. Given China's history of arbitrarily throwing out numbers to try to prop themselves up in the international community I cannot accept this as fact without some sort of independent verification. If China has in fact created the worlds fastest supercomputer, I congratulate them on a job well done. But I am still skeptical about this story. Sounds like my government (US) is just looking for an excuse to spend billions more on a new supercomputer.
Tianhe-1A is theoretically able to do more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second (one petaflop) at peak speed. Tianhe-1A 's peak performance reaches 1.206 petaflops, and it runs at 563.1 teraflops (1,000 teraflops is equal to one petaflop) on the Linpack benchmark.
That's almost enough to run Vista!
Is this faster than Blue Waters at NCSA is going to be in 2011?
The article starts by claiming 2.507 petaflops, but gives no mention if that is Rmax or Rpeak. We have to assume that it is Rmax, since 2.5 petaflops is no big deal in terms of Rpeak.
Unfortunately, then the article lists both Rpeak and Rmax. But the numbers quoted seem to be for Tianhe-I (#7 on the top 500 list), not Tianhe-IA (not currently listed). Wikipedia table of the top 10
Oh, and it gets better. The article claims that Tianhe-IA has 7,168 GPUs and 14,336 CPUs. Very strange, since the Tianhe-I has 71,680 CPU/GPU pairs.
My guess is that China doubled up their Tianhe-I computer and swapped out for newer GPUs, then named the new thing Tianhe-IA (this is pretty normal when competing for top500 spots). I'm going to go with 143,360 Xeon/M2050 pairs. Either that, or the Chinese found a way to overclock 10% of their chips into the 20+ GHz range and threw out the rest.
See that "Preview" button?
Supercomputing is largely a solved problem...do a regression analysis on the variables on the Top 500 sometime. Primarily it's a function of the number of cores. I've told people in my own workplace - you want a machine on the Top 500 then write me a cheque - making a supercomputer isn't the feat of skill or engineering that it was in the days of Cray. This doesn't even touch on what the hell you use these things for the problem space for parallel processing is clearly smaller than that of serial processing. Add to that the assertion that the number of useful applications drops off steeply as you add more cores (at some point you are left with only the "embarrassingly parallel" ones) and creating the largest supercomputer in the world is akin to saying you are creating the least useful computer in the world. Not to mention probably one of the least power efficient, highest maintenance costs, etc..
What metric should one use to compare supercomputers? Using the amount of floating point operations performed per second (FLOPS) comes across as a little silly, because if you just pile together a sufficient amount of standard PC's, you should be able to top it (maybe Folding@home could be considered a bigger supercomputer). Therefore, I assume that the interconnectivity (and the speed related to it) of the CPU's should have something to do with it...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
The only reason it's so fast is because a half hour after you feed it data, it's hungry again...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
- what "nationalist chest thumping" went on to make the Large Hadron Collider happen?
just curious to see how this fits into your theory. I've no idea, maybe you have the answer. But the LHC seems to have got built, and not as a war time artefact (in my ignorant opinion). Seems more like a collaboration between nations.
Education on this point welcomed.....
his sources. As reported on CNN from Mashable:
Unveiled Wednesday at the Annual Meeting of National High Performance Computing (HPC China 2010) in Beijing, Tianhe-1A is the world's fastest supercomputer with a performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the LINPACK benchmark.
Tianhe-1A was designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China, and it is already fully operational.
To achieve the new performance record, Tianhe-1A uses 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs.
It cost $88 million; its 103 cabinets weigh 155 tons, and the entire system consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity.
Tianhe-1A ousted the previous record holder, Cray XT5 Jaguar, which is used by the U.S. National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
It is powered by 224,162 Opteron CPUs and achieves a performance record of 1.75 petaflops.
According to Nvidia, Tianhe-1A will be operated as an open access system to use for large scale scientific computations.
Just sayin...
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
China: "We made the fastest super-computer!!!"
Intel and NVidia: "Uh - no you didn't, We are own all your processors!!!"
IBM and the NSF are already building a supercomputer which will have an eventual supposed peak performance of 10 petaflops: Blue Waters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Waters At the university of Illinois. I actually work at the university and have been by the building (it is complete), though we don't have the hardware yet from IBM. It is all starting to go in, though, and is supposed to be working before October of next year. So don't worry, it's not like the US is getting stomped in computing power.
Also, to those posters questioning the need for supercomputers......as someone who works on HPC code and applications, I cannot disagree with you more. We already have simulations that are not practical to run on modern supercomputers. In the grand scheme of things, these are not even terribly "complex" issues when compared to, say, modeling an entire human organ or even body. Imagine what we could do with something like that....you could test new "drugs" in a simulated environment and get a good idea of the effects (this is all just one idea that comes to mind)...
Purported accomplishments made by men needs to be divided by 3 to give the real picture (IE: I've slept with 12 different women throughout my life)
Purported accomplishments made by China needs to be divided by 100 to give the real picture (IE: We consider thousands of public petitions regarding corruption every year. We've just constructed the fastest train in the world etc.)
Purported accomplishments made by North Korea needs to be divided by infinity to give the real picture (IE: We've discovered the cure for cancer. We have a succesfull space-program. We are happy).
in about a year that it's full of lead, heavy metals, and other chemicals that are bad for babies and pregnant mothers.
Due to the Von Neuman bottleneck, most of the transistors in a computer are in the RAM, which is idle except for the row/column being accessed at a given time. The bitgrid gets around this by building a grid of look up tables which operate on 4 bits in and 4 bits. It should be quite easy to build a chip which has a million of these tables in a 1000x1000 grid. This would allow data to flow off the edges at a result per clock cycle.... which in modern CMOS is at least 1 Ghz.
Finding applications to run on a theoretical chip isn't easy... but synthetic focus imagery comes to mind. Imagine a survey plane with an array of cameras, generating 3d imagery with a resolution of 1 centimeter in all 3 dimensions, at a speed of 1000 kph at a height of 15,000 meters, giving a swath 5 km wide.... that's 14 Gigapixels/second of final product. I believe it's feasible to do this with the bit grid chip.
Anyone want to sponsor the research? If not, I'll stick to my day job.
Call me when China invents something like Tang.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Actually that whole "borrow money" stuff is bullshit, because we use a central bank with fiat currency creating systems, tha trickles down to local private banks and fractional reserve lending.
Those fed papers of various kinds the chinese buy are just crap "backed" by...the US printing press. And that's it. They are *stuck* with them, not blessed with them. There's a big difference. The Fed itself buys a lot of them back, where they can just be poofed away.
It's an elaborate grifter's congame, but not that hard to grok when you start with the understanding that they are created and "loaned" into existence. Then, no matter what they are called, T bills whatever, it's all variations on that same poof created into existence. It's a joke. Basically, we get boatloads of free stuff from china daily. They ain't gonna do this forever you know..they aren't that stupid.
Now, they HAD to do this while they were building up their manufacturing might over the past three decades, china I mean, because they turned around and bought machine tools, factories etc that they didn't have and needed FRNs for. Now..past tense. That was then, this is now. No longer expressly needed for most things, china has enough manufacturing know how to build most anything, with only a few highly specialized things left to conquer.
It has been an amazing wealth transference to the US based on cheap chinese labor, but like all grifter's scams it will end soon and the prices for imported goods will skyrocket, now that china is shifting their export focus to those nations with available raw materials to exploit, and also into arable land for growing more food. (Africa etc..they are buying it up daily). Their other huge market now is INTERNAL to themselves, they are switching from mass poverty and everyone having some sort of job, no matter how low paid, to now building their middle class.
They no longer need US IOU debt notes in other words. The change will be gradual, but that is 100% the trend and reality now. We hit the tip over point with those wall street thieves derivatives bomb that exploded.
US alleged debt, now measured in the tens of trillions, can only be met through hyper inflation or default, there is no non-awkward way for it to be paid off, taxes sure ain't gonna do it, that's a big fat joke, as is squabbling over minute changes to tax rates.
I'll bet it can't!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
China: "We made the fastest super-computer!!!"
Intel and NVidia: "Uh - no you didn't, We are own all your processors!!!"
The magic behind supercomputing isn't CPUs.
The real trick has always been the interconnects & the software that gets those thousands of C/GPUs talking to each other.
And don't ever forget that China is developing its own CPU.
It still sucks right now, but like with rare earth minerals, China is in this for the long haul.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
With the creation of the worlds fastest computer China no longer will be thought of as the land of cheap labor, but also as a land inhabited by the worlds fastest thinkers. Research and development was once monopolized by the US and it was the leader in the race for new products, but a yellow horse has now taken the lead. Unless the US regains its once creative workforce, it will finish out of the money.
US black projects have computing powers humanity can only dream about..
Area 51 is not called dreamland for nothing.
I love laughing at irrelevant pissing contests.
Yes, this is spot on for massively parallel systems. The interesting thing is that China does actually make their own interconnects, but they aren't so great. The Tianhe-1 actually runs at 47% of the theoretical capacity. In contrast, the previous number 1 (Jaguar) runs at about 76%. In fact, China's previous big HPC was Nebulae, which had a higher theoretical peak than Jaguar, but didn't actually perform faster because of interconnects problem.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
After an hour of processing I contracted lead poisoning and was inexplicably hungry...
Tianhe-1A is theoretically able to do more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second (one petaflop) at peak speed. Tianhe-1A 's peak performance reaches 1.206 petaflops,
But according to the news Jaguar is able to mosey along at 1.75 petaflops, and Tianhe is rolling along at 2.5. The petaflops barrier was broken a few years ago, so Tianhe is basically a product of Moore's law.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
The 3 gorges will have nothing on us. That'll show 'em!
And if destroying the natural beauty isn't enough, I'm sure we can find some priceless pueblo or ancient burial mound, and turn it into a cooling pond for a giant nuclear plant. Take that, China!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think it will be a combo of both default and hyper inflation (so your nasty student loan might go away eventually), followed by a brief and nasty civil war in the US, with overlapping players (but it will start with some states just saying FU to the feds... but then it will get more complex) then a break up, like the USSR went through, except I am afraid the violence will be more intense and long lasting..way too many entrenched government fatcats and big bankers don't want to lose their exalted positions and power and money they get now. So, they will do what despots always do "crack down" and make an attempt to ripoff and enslave the people more..but they will fail in the end of course.
Inevitable and it has to happen at this point. There is absolutely no, zero, nada way for the federal government (and the bulk of the states) to meet all these obligations it has promised to people, from social security to medical care to government worker pensions, on top of this alleged debt servicing and meeting the payroll they have now. Can't be done. Completely impossible.
It gets down to basic math, has nothing to do with right or left wing or this party in charge or that party, just the math says "impossible" so that means "collapsed empire". It isn't going to matter who people vote for, and all that petty nonsense that goes on with one set of victims blaming the other set, and both sets looking to millionaire party "leaders" to save them..I mean..believing in that stuff is like believing in the tooth fairy now. I think you really have to be hopelessly naive to have any faith in the current political structure being anything but a duopololistic kleptocracy.
aren't those chips actually made in china?
Sorry old timer, but you are a fucking idiot. Citation? Just go google it up yourself. I study economics and geopolitics daily, beyond the headlines. Your phony left/right republican versus democrat shit is last century. Anyone who still believes that shit is a fucking gibbering short bus drool. It's the same fatcat establishment, using the "divide and conquer" routine to keep their useful idiot political activists..activated.
It's POLITICAL THEATER. Follow the money and power upstream PAST those idiot TV spokespeople that get elected to see what is really going on. Shit fire and piss napalm, you failed to notice BOTH parties continued to payoff those wall street crooks when they couldn't cover all their insane derivative bets?? Fucking A... We had over one THOUSAND criminal convictions after the savings and loan scandal..how many convictions from the latest wall street ripoff, under EITHER the Rs or Ds? That's right... ZERO. Not a fucking one. Because your glorious Ds are JUST AS CORRUPT AND BOUGHT OFF.
This is sub junior high level...if you can't understand it, go do your own research.
They sold the economy out for short term profits, get it? Like corporate raiding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_raid, just on a hugemongous scale. Sell off the good stuff, show "huge profits" for a few quarters, then the assholes who have run the company down into bankruptcy bailout with golden parachutes. In this case though, it took a few decades, but it is THE SAME THING.
Oh, and to emphasize, fuck you and anyone else with your lame and retarded "big political differences" between the two 100% completely corrupt kleptocrat wings of the SAME PARTY.
Retarded morons keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results.. oh, more taxes will work...you idiot, they shoved off twenty million and counting WEALTH PRODUCING jobs, the BACKBONE of the US economy, and THOSE JOBS AREN'T COMING BACK. Ever hear of the "99ers"? Those are the people who have already gone through the often extended unemployment check payout period, now millions of them are facing either get even more extensions (more debt), or out on the street..because THE JOBS AIN'T COMING BACK. No jobs, no taxes, get it yet? Record numbers of people on food stamps? They have to cook the books on unemployment figures? They strip food and energy costs from the cost of living index to keep it low, so they don't have to bump up COLA adjustment payments? Any of this cross your inbox lately?
Jeebus people like you are annoying. But you just go right ahead and yank that old Big D for dementia lever, as opposed to the big R for retarded lever...people like you are the major problem. You just *insist* on staying faked out.
NO I don't have "citations" from paying attention for the last half a century to this, there isn't any one or two links to show you...man..
Well, here is ONE citation to get you started.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
You suffer from it. Get that licked, the other stuff will fall into place. /lecture
China: "Your property is only imaginary! We are own all your fab lines!!"
Biggest Olympics.
Fastest train.
Fastest computer.
And doing it all without spending more than they earn (I'm not sure why Americans want a stronger Yuan. Doesn't it just means whatever they have is worth a lot more?).
We need to trample on human rights a bit more. Hasn't seem to hurt China's progress too much.
Check facts please.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/china-supercomputer/
To put it in perspective:
Chinas new super computer:
$ 88,000,000
US defense budget 2009:
$ 515,400,000,000
Yeah, I can't see how you could possible be able to afford anything like this!
(And who knows, eventually your military already has it, or much better gear, just not bragging about it in the open.)
Yeah, this supercomputer is totally 'meh', at reading the title I was hoping they used https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Loongson#Loongson_3 not nvidious crap.
Except those pesky wars. Weapons that are built often end up getting USED.. you know..
With the weapons we have now, if that next war comes there won't be a world after it, or if there is, it will be so horrible that life won't be worth living.. (total destruction of literacy, global destruction of habitat/species, starvation, endemic cannibalism)
Would you want to live in a freezing, toxic, moldy world where all the plants and animals, and almost all the other people were dead, and those who weren't, only wanted to EAT you?
That's what happens. Look at the fossil record.
powerful, FAR less powerful, than all but the VERY cheapest embedded microprocessors that are sold today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
The best computers that they had during the Apollo years were less powerful than the most basic embedded microprocessors that power household appliances.
That's food for thought.