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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."
Competitive in what, exactly? We have many supercomputers in the USA; we have no idea what to do with them, though, and many of them are spending a lot of time idle. Some supercomputers are now being rented out to investors, because the people the computers were built for -- the scientists -- are not using enough computer time.
What we really need to do is look at the state of research in this country. Also, maybe if we had a more solid economic base, one in which we solve the trade imbalance by exporting real goods rather than copyrights, we could spend more money on science and supercomputing. Oh well, in your words, "who am I kidding?"
Palm trees and 8
Oh, like this doesn't go both ways. At least they didn't start bribing/kidnapping our scientists to make "Dooms Day" devices in a hidden lair in the desert, like we did with the Germans in the Manhattan project.
Also that Washington Times article is way out of date. The proceedings of the Wen Hoo Lee trial (accused of stealing the W88 warhead for China) embarrassed public officials to the point where Bill Clinton had to issue an apology and the US government had to pay an undisclosed settlement to Lee.
The fact was US military research bases had slack handling protocols for classified documents. This was glaringly obvious as the cause of all the leaked secrets. However, to save their careers, the managers made Lee a scapegoat. Turns out it was common practice to take classified documents to work on at home. The only reason Lee was singled out for it was, because he was Asian.
There is nothing useless about a supercomputer. Oak Ridge National Lab has over a billion dollar budget each year and huge portions of that budget relies on the availability of high performance computing resources. (Not to mention all the other national labs) HPC supports research in areas like energy conservation, new power sources, bioinformatics, material science, weapons simulations, engineering, and computer science. Applications range from freeing ourselves of fossil fuel reliance to designing materials to be used in [insert next big product]. HPC is the reason we don't need to do nuclear weapon testing anymore. HPC is the reason our grandkids will have a longer average lifespan. I can guarantee that these machines wouldn't be built for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars if they weren't being used. And I can guarantee that when the US regains #1, it won't be for the sake of being #1... it will be for the necessity of furthering science that benefits us all.
Japan also did not have the level of poverty that China does.
China won't be going away, if anything changes they will have to start to focus on satisfying domestic markets. Heck thats the reason western companies want to get into the Chinese market and not just take advantage of chinese labour.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.