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."
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!
Stolen? I don't know. Purchased? From the article:
So unless Nvidia and Intel have reported 20,000 or so stolen processors lately, I wouldn't worry too much.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Sadly, China needed to build this computer simply to calculate the interest on the US debt in realtime.
Oak Ridge (Jaguar):
Cores Rmax(GFlops) Rpeak(GFlops) Nmax Nhalf
224162 1759000 2331000 5474272 0
Seems faster by a good margin.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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
China: "We made the fastest super-computer!!!"
Intel and NVidia: "Uh - no you didn't, We are own all your processors!!!"
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!