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Chinese Tianhe-1A Supercomputer Starts Churning Out the Science
gupg writes "When China built the world's fastest supercomputer based on NVIDIA GPUs last year, a lot of naysayers said this was just a stunt machine. Well, guess what — here comes the science! They are working on better material for solar panels and they ran the world's fastest simulation ever. NVIDIA (whose GPUs accelerate these applications as a co-processor) blogged on this a while ago, where they talk about how the US really needs to up its investment in high performance computing."
you mean it is not for mining bitcoins?
NVIDIA (whose GPUs accelerate these applications as a co-processor) blogged on this a while ago, where they talk about how the US really needs to up its investment in high performance computing."
This just in: Company who makes GPUs for supercomputers thinks that people should buy more of their GPUs.
You know what they say about capitalists and rope...
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Rendering photo-realistic 3D tentacle porn for the Japanese?
Is there cake?
Big deal, we use our supercomputers to play Jeopardy...LOSERS!
On Thursday, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Process Engineering (CAS-IPE) claimed to have run a molecular simulation code at 1.87 petaflops -- the highest floating point performance ever achieved by a real-world application code.
> US really needs to up its investment in high performance computing
More like: 'we've upped our investment, now up yours!"
*Still* negative function...
you mean it is not for mining bitcoins?
Nah If they were going to mine bitcoins they would gone with ATI.
Unless somebody has substantially improved factorization techniques, I'm pretty sure that this machine doesn't much change the world of what is safe vs. what is broken.
I suspect that it can churn through some nice offline hash attacks; but offline hash attacks generally imply that the break-in has already succeeded. Applications where the public keys are exposed to the world by design(TLS, digital signatures, etc.) try for a much greater margin of safety. If somebody is using a crypto setup so weak that a thousands to millionfold increase in available power seriously threatens them, they have issues(the remaining users of 56-bit DES should probably be crying).
Anyone that measures aggregate CPU performance on a cluster in "GHz" is an idiot.
An article about a supercomputer and it's performance, and only 1 or 2 comments that are not snarky or bitchin about something. Just go back and read them. Total waste of a person's time, like most comments in most articles. I'm turning in my Karma and password. See ya.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
its a half-page blog post from the systems vendor, nvidia, singing the praises of their customer. as a computer scientist i want an independent scientific review...so should you, slashdot 2.0
"Andy Keane joined NVIDIA in 2006 as GM of the new GPU Computing business unit. Previously, he was a VP at start-ups Morphics and Ageia, which focused on the development of parallel computing technologies for the telecoms and consumer industries. "
oh goodie...the blog isnt even from a scientist at nvidia, just one of their general managers.
Ill save some time for ya, the other link is just third party shit from HPCwire singing the praises of nvidia, plugging their NASDAQ tag, and once again singing the praises of nvidia with sponsored ads.
oh, and of course authors will insist [insert potential rival competitor country here] invest more in high performance computing.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"how the US really needs to up its investment in high performance computing."
As long as the defense industry continues to give (contribute) generously to members of the US government we can rest assured that the USofA will spend every buck it can print on useless, futile, BULLSHIT wars to the exclusion of any science, no matter how important.
Wars are BIG business, nobody in the government gives a shit about "terrorism" or "defending freedom", all any of these cynical, crooked parasites care about is money and the pursuit of absolute power!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
I only know of minor successes in materials engineering and genetics but even those weren't very commercially successful. A course I took at MIT about 6 years ago the professor was talking about saving 10 million for Ford using HPC materials engineering modelling but 10 million isn't very impressive. I always hear HPC "is working on" a bunch of exciting sounding stuff but I never have heard of any big successes. Has there been any big achievement of HPC other than rendering 3D movies quicker, breaking codes during wars, and helping governments spy on their own people?
We need to use Reagan's strategy of deficit spending to out-innovate China.
"The US really needs to up its investment in high performance computing."
Really? Well let's have a look at the top500 list shall we? Now while Linpack leaves some things to be desired (like the fact that clusters perform better on it than they can on some things like particle simulation) but it is the standard.
So of the top 10 system 5, half, are in the US. #2, 5, 7, 8 and 10 are US computers. The next 10? 7 of them in the US. So 12 of the top 20 are US systems. Most of them are US government systems too, and the ones that aren't are university. So not like "Big companies that happen to be in the US," but research universities and government research agencies like the DOE and so on.
It also isn't stopping. The Advanced Simulation & Computing Program (formerly ASCI) is going on and more computers are being built. LANL has chosen Cray to build the next one, Cielo. It is partially complete and online now, though still being added to. Currently #10 on the list, it will move up a bit when it is complete.
So I don't see the US as not investing in this.
What I see them not doing is buying nVidia GPU based systems, which is fine. GPUs are neat and all but they are not as general purpose as CPUs. They are stream processors. Now if your project is one that stream processors are good at then great. However not all projects are. Particle simulation, that I mentioned before, is one that stream processors aren't so good at. So just because something is higher on the Linpack based top500, doesn't mean it is faster at everything.
Regardless, it isn't like the US needs to be on the number 1 spot to be good. The more telling fact is how many are there, that the US has over half of the systems in the top 20. Clearly supercomputers are something the US has plenty of. Keep going down the list and you keep seeing a lot of US systems.
This is just nVidia trying to play on the whole patriotism thing to make sales.
Naah... for that they will be using the big brother of this machine which not mentioned in this article because it is classified. Do you think the Chinese tell everyone about their national security projects?
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
anything we put into new technology just ends up in the patent portfolio's pocket with their blanket 'innovations'
I think The Chinese government has much better ways of spying on people than to hog processor time on such a public machine. He'll, they don't even need to break RSA keys anymore.
I love how people jump to the conclusion that any powerful computer that we learn about in China is suddenly s security threat. It's the ones they don't tell you about that you should be concerned about.
Funny how people marvel if it's the US but run in fear if it's China. Both have terrible track records when it comes to human rights.
"capitalism" just fits so perfectly.
That's such a "neo-con" thing to say. Not everyone uses words like you think they should. Maybe you should read a dictionary to see how words are supposed to be used.
you dont know too much about Teachers Unions and have been listening to far too much Republican bullshit. Teachers unions for years have fought for better education funding, better materials for their children. The fact is teachers are being paid far less in the US than they are in Japan. If teachers are being asked to do far more, at least we should pay them similar to what they are paid in other advanced countries. Look. Republicans whine and complain about teachers pay but then they give tax breaks to billionaires who exploit workers and destroy jobs.Teachers work hard and are far more valuable than some bankster, corporate elitists, etc. It is disgusting, Republicans purely sefish, greedy behaviour which is a crass display of all of the worst and most irresponsible and self centered behaviour. We punish those in society who are dedicated to serving the public, everyone rich or poor, and then reward those who enrich themselves from stealing from the commoners. Republicans and the conservatives are authoritarian fascists who are driven purely by greed, arrogance and cruelty and that is their entire ethos. Its time to restore altruism, compassion, decency and unselfishness to this society, where people serve the common good is seen as a noble trait, rather than selfishly acting to enrich themselves.
"A good capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with" is, AFAIK, a Karl Marx aphorism
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
for the people who are... still alive....
Dont worry the CIA understands China, like it understood the Soviets.
At anytime they can induce cults, fads, music, addictive sci fi, secessionist movements, hardware, software issues, payment issues, NGO "outrageous", intellectual property, middle class rights, property bubbles ect.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
They bought the biggest supercomputer in the world outside various national intelligence agencies, and all they can do is come up with yet another variation of just-around-the-corner solar technology? What's next, tokamak fusion, batteries with high energy and power density, and flying cars?
NASA is also using GPUs -- looks for climate / atmospheric modeling.
So is the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration).
Didn't you even read the summary? They didn't steal it, they bought it from Nvidia just like anyone else can.
Is the US the only country that is allowed to be any good at this? To me it seems the story isn't the US investment in supercomputing is dropping, because it isn't. The story is that other countries are investing more in it. That is a good thing IMO. The US shouldn't be the be-all, end-all of research.
Also please remember the nature of these things are that you get displaced. You are #1, someone builds a new #1. It isn't like you can just whack out a new one. Supercomptuers take a lot of time and money to build.
Funny how people marvel if it's the US but run in fear if it's China. Both have terrible track records when it comes to human rights.
Funny how people keep comparing the United States and China (or more explicitly, the United States Federal Government with the Peoples Republic of China, which isn't exactly a Republic.) Usually it's people who haven't spent any time in either country, and know nothing about either culture. The reason is pretty obvious: it's an attempt to tear down the U.S. in people's minds by associating it with the world's largest totalitarian state, and by definition indicates that the individual making the claim knows very well that China's track record is far worse. Otherwise, the claim would be on the order of "Funny how people marvel if it's China but run in fear if it's the U.S." Trial lawyers use the same trick: mention the defendant in the same breath as the accused, try to take the defendant down a notch or two. It's more than a little sleazy, but on small-minded people it is often effective. Besides, what do human rights have to do with this? At best, we're talking simple espionage (which I would certainly hope that we are just as guilty of doing to them), and at worst, acts of war.
However, I agree with you about this particular supercomputer. Like most such states, the Chinese government is very concerned about world opinion (because most of the world doesn't take kindly to (ahem!) "authoritarian" governments.) Like the Soviet Union before it, China's leaders want to show off their technological prowess, demonstrate their superiority to the West. They should be careful about doing that, however. Russia touched off the Space Race by launching Sputnik, so sometimes there are unintended consequences to such posturing. Hell, U.S. monitoring of Sputnik's transmissions was a source of inspiration for what ultimately became the Global Positioning System. Fact is, it can be risky to galvanize your enemy into taking action with a PR stunt: that's especially true with a country like the U.S. when the people get fired up about something: government officials often have to respond, if nothing else to keep their jobs. It's not exactly a rational way to handle things, but that is often how it works.
The difference here is that a lot of us could implicitly grasp how important control over near-space was to our security, and supported space development at the time. Today, not so much: I doubt that many of my fellow Americans give a damn about supercomputers, or would even have the slightest idea of their value, and what can be accomplished with them. And I'd say you're also right that this probably not China's most powerful machine: they'd be fools to let us know their true capabilities in this regard.
Nor are are the U.S.-based supercomputing systems that we know about anywhere near the real top-of-the-line: nobody really knows what the NSA has at its disposal, for example. But I can pretty much guarantee that they aren't toys.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.