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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."
And the fastest social and economic downturn is in America...coincidence?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Yeah, lets borrow more money from the Chinese Government so we can build a useless supercomputer to outdo them - just to say we did it! Thanks, grandkids!
What are you suggesting?
Growing population by a factor of 5?
Decrease salaries?
Spend lots of the money on small high image projects while most of the rest of the country remain poor?
I do understand that they will eventually catch up, but in the mean time you Americans are way ahead of the average Chinese.
we went to the moon during a period of nationalist chest thumping, and when the nationalist chest thumping subsided, we haven't been back. countries that are interested in nationalist chest thumping: china, india, etc, are still pumping up their space programs
what i am saying is, for all the evils of nationalism, scientific advancement in the realm of large projects seems to be a positive byproduct
for example, if we were still in a cold war with the ussr in the 1990s, i will bet you anything that this would have been completed and would be producing amazing science at this point in time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
INTEL, IBM, and other high tech firms have been sending their R&D, engineering and other high up on the job food chain jobs over there and to India. They have been building up expertise in other countries. Of course this happened.
We the US will become a technological backwater. Of course the pundits will say shit like "American kids just aren't studying science and engineering" or "It's our education system."
The answer is: why should a bright kid go into science or engineering when he won't be able to get a job? Whereas, if he goes into medical, he's pretty much guaranteed a very nice living.
It's not the education system; it's the market. The market here in the US is saying that engineering and science careers just aren't worth as much as others and it's saying that there are plenty of qualified and cheaper engineers overseas - all thanks to US companies moving there.
As we are seeing NOW, the Chinese and Indians no longer need American companies - they don't need IBM or whoever to come in a spend the millions setting up shop. They can do that themselves now thank you very much. End result: US based companies will be sidelined.
So kids, apply to foreign firms because US based companies have made themselves irrelevant.
And business owners, bypass the middlemen (IBM and whatnot) and buy direct from their suppliers in India and China - you'll save the costs of over paid American management and sales people.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
China: "We made the fastest super-computer!!!"
Intel and NVidia: "Uh - no you didn't, We are own all your processors!!!"
all of european advancement over the last 10 centuries can be traced to tribal and then nationalist competition
french spanish and british frigates would not have been sailing around india, china and the south pacific, making military inroads, if french spanish and british galleons were not first doing their best to better shoot holes into one another
in fact, you can say china and india stagnated behind european scientific advancement precisely because there was no fever pitch nationalist rivalries in those areas
european history is exhibit number one of scientific advancement propelled forward by nationalist rivalry, hardly an example of a contrast to what i am saying
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it