China Builds 1-Petaflop Homegrown Supercomputer

MrSeb writes "Drawing yet another battle line between the incumbent oligarchs of the West and the developing hordes of the East, China has unveiled a new supercomputer that uses entirely-homegrown processors — 8,704 of them, to be exact. The computer is called Sunway BlueLight MPP and it has a peak performance of just over 1 petaflop — or around the 15th fastest supercomputer in the world. Sunway uses the ShenWei SW-3 1600, a 16-core, 64-bit MIPS-compatible (RISC) CPU. The process used to make the chips is not known, but it is likely 65 or 45nm, a few generations behind Intel's latest and greatest. Each of the 139,264 cores runs at 1.1GHz, the entire system has 150TB of memory and 2PB of storage, and of course it's water-cooled. The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture, which China — as in, the country itself — probably reverse engineered from a DEC Alpha CPU in 2001 and has been developing ever since. Sunway is significant for two reasons: a) It's very low-power; it consumes just one megawatt, about half of its contemporaries and one seventh of the US's Jaguar — and b) This is China's first significant supercomputer to be built without Intel or AMD processors."

Comments

"Homegrown"?

[eldavojohn]

From the article:

The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture, which China — as in, the country itself — has been steadily developing since 2001. It is believed that the Loongson family of processors, including the ShenWei SW-3 found in Sunway, were created by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU.

So you're saying that the entirely homegrown processor was started by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU? Sounds very telling of China's position on innovation (copy/paste). I'm very excited someone is putting pressure on the nations of the world to compute like a boss but it does rub me the wrong way when the title of the article is titled with a "West vs. East" prefix. I'm not trying to get all "Rah Rah USA" here but isn't all the fabrication and chip design built on top of so much history from all around the world? Calling anything entirely "homegrown" in supercomputers or chip design seems kind of unbelievable to me. Unless China's got something radically original, I'm guessing they owe at least a little credit to so much work done in the USA, Europe the rest of Asia. I mean, it is RISC, right?

This "East vs. West" and "homegrown" stuff is kind of misleading and I find this amusing:

Lest you think this is merely serendipitous happenstance, think again: China has repeatedly stated that it wishes to sever its reliance on American/Western high-tech — and now it can add supercomputers to its rapidly growing list of (mostly reverse-engineered) successes.

And when that is deemed "too slow" where do you turn to move forward? Do you draw on your internal innovation to come up with a new design and process to defeat your opponents or do you merely go back to re-engineering your opponent's latest chip?

Very soon, perhaps by 2020, the only edge that the US will have is in the realm of research and innovation ...

Reverse engineering is innovation? Okay so when China outstrips the United States and defeats the evil Western corporations, who then will they turn to for reverse engineering targets? Also, what is driving this chip to innovate? Who are the competitors for Loongson/Godson? Nobody inside their borders, the government is funding that! That's the problem when your government pays for and decides what you're going to use. Once that's in place, you can sit back and soak up that fat federal funding. Where's the competition going to come from?

... and today's announcement of the Sunway supercomputer suggests that the US might not have as much of an advantage as it would hope.

Hey man, I love FUD if it kicks our politicians into dumping more of that Military Industrial Complex cash into Science and Research but ... feel free to call me skeptical of your last conclusion. The fact is that by 2020 they're still going to be using this same reverse engineered chip design -- unless they're on their way to reverse engineering another.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[h00manist]

It likely won't be long before there are plans for a DIY supercomputer that a group of engineers can build in their homes.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[adamchou]

But with that mentality, many things aren't truly homegrown. Granted, reverse engineering a CPU is much more complex than reversing many other things, but lots of stuff we have today was based on copying others. Even the late great Steve Jobs at one time proudly professed "Good artists copy, great artists steal"

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Synerg1y]

I was a little bit surprised that China had to reverse engineer a chip to make this computer, however it makes sense since they do not have the technology infrastructure set up to make their own. However, outside of ethics, isn't it illegal to copy a copyrighted design? I mean if China reverse engineered sandy bridge and named it sandy bridge - the chinese version, that in the USA is a copyright suite, what about on a global scale though?

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Lulfas]

A dozen PS3s linked up is probably close enough.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Anonymous Coward]

One day they'll surpass us or at least get on the same level. It's inevitable since their science and engineering population is way bigger than the West's. Sure, they're just reverse engineering designs today, but that's how anyone gets their start -- you build off the current leader. It's easy to be dismissive now but they have a lot of potential.

It's like how Japan was dismissed in the past but now they're huge in the electronics industry, and that's with a comparatively tiny population with little resources. What can China do with much more money and much more people?

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Richard_at_work]

You say that when one of the main architectures we use in the west (x86) was created by one company, and reverse engineered by its main rival to compete with it...

Oh, and the whole Compaq reverse engineering the IBM PC Bios to compete with IBM...

I've got no issues at all with China doing the same.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[G3ckoG33k]

Sorry, you are ridiculous. You just underestimated a nation three times the size of USA, and an economy with a continued growth potential, despite already twenty years of explosive growth.

What you learned about copy-cat Asians from the sixties and seventies may be valid for the Chinese today, in part. Give them a few decades of copying and they'll learn to do original research soon enough; and they already do, btw.

Do you still think the Japanese are copy-cats? Not any longer. They perhaps were some fifty years ago, but haven't been for decades.

Sorry, but the brute force of 1.X billion Chinese is larger than 0.3X of the US. The education level in the greater cities of China already surpasses that of many areas in the US. Rural china vs rural US? Tough choice.

"The fact is that by 2020 they're still going to be using this same reverse engineered chip design"

Don't worry, you'll see stepwise improvements on that too; Intel is still building on improvements made for their Pentium Pro. The only radical change for Intel, the Itanium, was a financial disaster.

Bark elsewhere. The Chinese have yet again shown how to do it, at home.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Picaso said that.. Steve Jobs stole it and then parked in handicapped parking lots just to be a dick.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad to see you hold this attitude. That was exactly the cause of failure of any arrogant country in history - blindfolding yourself w/o open thinking. China learnt this in hard way. It seems this time is your turn.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chip designs aren't protected by copyright, they are protected by Integrated circuit layout design protection
In the U.S. this protection lasts 10 years and the DEC Alpha is from 1992. (Design protection expired 9 years ago.)
Note that the design protection only applies to the actual stencil for the IC and that "reproduction for reverse engineering of a mask work is specifically permitted by the law."

It was never illegal to reverse engineer the DEC Alpha according to U.S. law and even if it had been the protection would have expired by now.
The design protection laws might be different in China, perhaps they don't want their engineers to be able to copy the design of others.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Kjella]

Calling anything entirely "homegrown" in supercomputers or chip design seems kind of unbelievable to me.

And all cars are German because everybody has been copying Daimler and Benz (car analogy, w00t), it's a matter of degree. It's at least homegrown in the sense that it's domestically produced and they are not currently relying on foreign companies do produce it. And since a 2001 era Dec Alpha would be built on 180nm process and this is supposedly on 45 or 65nm, they've clearly redesigned it quite a lot adjusting timings, gates and all that. You can't just take a design and make it 1/4th the size. That tells me they actually know a lot about this technology themselves.

And when that is deemed "too slow" where do you turn to move forward? Do you draw on your internal innovation to come up with a new design and process to defeat your opponents or do you merely go back to re-engineering your opponent's latest chip?

That's not an either-or question.

Reverse engineering is innovation? Okay so when China outstrips the United States and defeats the evil Western corporations, who then will they turn to for reverse engineering targets?

Just because it's unsustainable in the long run, doesn't mean it makes sense now. Innovation is possible, but they're so far behind copying is faster. As long as you're ignoring IP laws, that seems logical. Hollywood ignored copyright laws, now that the balance is in their favor they enforce it with vigor.

Also, what is driving this chip to innovate? Who are the competitors for Loongson/Godson? Nobody inside their borders, the government is funding that! That's the problem when your government pays for and decides what you're going to use. Once that's in place, you can sit back and soak up that fat federal funding. Where's the competition going to come from?

You might as well say the Apollo program had no domestic competition, the country was founding it. China wants homegrown CPUs and supercomputers so they will run a program to get it, and it'll run for as long as they need it to run.

The fact is that by 2020 they're still going to be using this same reverse engineered chip design -- unless they're on their way to reverse engineering another.

You must not have been paying very good attention to what China is doing, they're absorbing high tech at a huge rate. Their high speed rail is a good example, they imported technology from Germany and Japan, then kept building on it. They now have the largest high speed rail network in the world, with their own train designs. You think that isn't their goal with CPUs? Grab what you can, build on top. It doesn't have to be #1, just good enough they don't rely on anyone else.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rural china vs rural US? Tough choice.

If you think rural China vs rural US is a tough choice, you are the one who is being ridiculous. Rural China makes Appalachia look like Beverly Hills.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Open thinking and China are not yet synonymous and may never be. It is a significant cultural difference most do not understand.

You go with the flow there and you never criticise or think beyond consensus.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[theshowmecanuck]

The Chinese will only ever be innovative when they have a government that doesn't persecute free thinkers. Free thinkers tend to find fault with systems that are restrictive in nature. The Chinese Communist Party has to be one of the most restrictive governments around that brooks no descent, nor criticism. As we have seen historically and currently that China continues to throw artists and other free thinkers in prison or worse. To innovate means to think outside the box means to be a free thinker. Get my drift? Once the communists fall or somehow find a way to allow people to say or think anything they want, then your assertions about the China of the future where they will innovate and no longer have to copy or reverse engineer products in order to compete. Until that time, you are just staring down a pipe dream.

Note that this doesn't mean they won't still fuck up the western economy. But that is more a function of western companies and their bonus chasing executives not giving a rat's ass about where they get their money and offshoring the manufacture of technology invented in the west; and turning a blind eye to China copying it for their own use since they will have got their bonuses by then.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[hackstraw]

There is no way anybody can design a modern processor from scratch without reverse engineering. Think of how many man years is in a processor. Even with the reverse engineering they were only able to obtain 45nm technology which is a few years old. If china started today, it would take them 10-20 years to make a processor 10-20 years out of date. What good is that?

This machine is impressive nonetheless. It uses good power 1MW. Only uses off-the-shelf networking (Infiniband). Only uses 9 racks of space. If they put those on the market, they would sell quite well (at the right price).

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Anonymous Coward]

To quote a great person, who ripped it off from another personality, "Good artists borrow. Great artists steal."

Re:"Homegrown"?

[LifesABeach]

You sure Jobs didn't read it on a bathroom wall at Xerox many years ago?

Re:"Homegrown"?

[gx5000]

Saved me a bunch of writing. Not many of us here were at dec when we heard about the lawsuits against Intel and Microsoft for their thefts of Alpha and Vax code (Pentium Pro and WinNT). They are still re writing history as we speak (Bill G's history of DOS, which always makes me giggle, a stolen TOS is now a written code from his friend) Just goes to show.. Cheers !

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Anonymous Coward]

What would be the problem with getting all "Rah Rah USA"?

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was that back when he still saw everything in color, before deciding it shouldall be viewed in black and white (logos)?

Re:"Homegrown"?

[ilguido]

The USSR was pretty innovative nonetheless (sputnik, the LUNA programme, Gagarin, MIR, TOKAMAK, aircraft supermanoevreability, most of the chaotic systems theory...)

Re:"Homegrown"?

[pjabardo]

You have some interesting points but things are much more complicated. What about the Soviet Union? Were they not innovative in several fields? Hell, what about Nazi Germany?

You could argue that they were spending "innovation capital" acquired before. That could be true for Nazi Germany even though before WWI it was not much of a democracy. But Russia? It basically changed one nasty dictatorship for another.

On the other hand, often innovation (arts and literature) sometimes thrive in dictatorships, at least for a limited amount of time: Russia under the Czars and in the early Soviet period is an example, but the same could be said for much of Latin America under brutal military dictatorships.

Athens thrived under democracy but so did Florence under autocratic rule in the Renaissance.

But one thing seems clear, an open and free society favors the spread of innovation. For instance much development in technology in the last 50 years was the result of military equipment that was completely useless and expensive but the difference between the USSR and USA is that many of these new technologies were allowed to be used in other sectors of the economy. In the the USSR the technology was simply a drain in the country's human and material resources and their economy paid the price.

One thing that should not be forgotten is that dictatorships don't appear out of nowhere: they usually have support from large portions of society that only slowly erodes and the dictatorship provides a focal point for these portions of society. So for a limited amount of time (1 5, 10, 20, 40 years? Who knows) a dictatorship could stimulate innovation. And the fight to topple the dictatorship is obviously another focal point that might contribute in promoting creativity (very strong influence in the arts and literature).

But on the long run you are probably right.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[thenewt]

Reverse engineering is innovation? Okay so when China outstrips the United States and defeats the evil Western corporations, who then will they turn to for reverse engineering targets? Also, what is driving this chip to innovate? Who are the competitors for Loongson/Godson? Nobody inside their borders, the government is funding that! That's the problem when your government pays for and decides what you're going to use. Once that's in place, you can sit back and soak up that fat federal funding. Where's the competition going to come from?

Of course nothing happens in a vacuum. Blah blah blah. Let's avoid ALSO slipping into a capitalist vs. communist ideological catfight here. We're talking about processors. First of all, I think it's naive to assume that China will continue to feel that copying is good enough. If supremacy is their agenda, as you seem to be suggesting, surely they'll attempt to take what they learn and run with it in as soon as they are capable. Japan started by imitating US tech, and look what they've done with it (and what the US has done with its own tech in the meantime :/ ). Taking them as an example, I find your argument re: market competition ironic - while U.S. manufacturing giants like GMC ask for bailouts (who's supping from the teat of government funding?) and stagnate in providing any real innovation, Asian products dominate the U.S. market. The assertion that free market capitalism is at the root of U.S. tech innovation is laughable - U.S. corporations are more interested in profit than innovation, and are bleeding incentives away from their home turf because they can pay less for it in the East. The main reason the U.S. is still on top of the high tech market is that it's a young technology, birthed from the military industrial complex (and how much public funding has gone into that over the last 60 years? Fat government funding indeed. Give me a break). Give it another 20-30 years and we'll see whose economic practices allow for innovation in the global tech industry.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[houghi]

they imported technology from Germany and Japan, then kept building on it

It used to be that Japan was the place that only was able to copy stuff and not make anything themselves.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Goaway]

I was a little bit surprised that China had to reverse engineer a chip to make this computer,

I was more surprised that they managed to create a MIPS architecture by reverse-engineering an Alpha chip.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reverse engineering is innovation? Okay so when China outstrips the United States and defeats the evil Western corporations, who then will they turn to for reverse engineering targets?

So you're claiming that China "reverse engineer" the CPU used in this supercomputer? Based on what?

So far there isn't a single shred of evidence to show that this chip was reverse engineered. The article talked about "It is believed that the Loongson family of processors, including the ShenWei SW-3 found in Sunway, were created by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU."

"Believed" by whom? Based on what? The vast majority of Americans believe in virgin birth. Doesn't make that true.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Anonymous Coward]

US persecute free thinkers - just look at all the #OWSer in jail. Or all the civil rights activists back int he 60's who were persecuted. So what's your point?

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that the GP had problems with reverse engineering either. But then people aren't writing articles saying that AMD has a homegrown x86 chip. The design is in-house, sure. But its still x86, which sets the not-grown-here flag.

As far as Compaq goes.. we referred to them as IBM PC clones. Y'know.. clones. As in, the ultimate not-original-to-us.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[theshowmecanuck]

Do you mean like how Hitler wanted the first jet fighter redesigned as a jet bomber, which it wasn't suited for, thus delaying the eventual production of the jet fighter till the end of the war, when they finally gave in to the inevitable? I'm glad the dictator listened so well to the innovators that they never were able to keep the air superiority that jet fighters would have given them. One of the things that helped us avoid having jackboots in our shoe stores today.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[lennier]

that brooks no descent

I beg to dissent. The USA hasn't shipped a decent Descent for years either.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[galanom]

You say there was not any inter-company espionage in the US at least at the early days ('80s)?
Come on...

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that the great ole US of A did the same damn thing while it was developing right?

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a whole lot of free thinking for a Chinese guy- How'd you escape re-education? Oh, that's right. You came to the United States.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Peristaltic]

Spent some time there last summer. I was working within a large university in Beijing, and was interested to observe that it was a Big center of pro-State attitudes. I mean, take a Young Republicans group at a large State university and expand it to 80% of the student body, and that's what it felt like. Also, repetition, by rote and endless drilling in subjects seemed to be the focus were I was- You're correct about open thinking.

My biggest surprise, however, was while riding the train to Xian and getting up to crap at 2am, walking into the "bathroom" and almost falling into the crapping hole cut in the floor of the train. Innovative- No honey pots to clean, and stuff grows -very- well around railroad tracks.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[theshowmecanuck]

oops

Re:"Homegrown"?

[theshowmecanuck]

You are mistaking espionage for innovation.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[Fjandr]

i386 wasn't reverse engineered by AMD, if that's what you meant. AMD had the complete specs, since that was required to fulfill their manufacturing contract with Intel.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[uninformedLuddite]

There I sat brokenhearted
Pissing my pants
everytime I farted

Re:"Homegrown"?

[ilguido]

Naaa, their shuttles never blew up so frequently.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[pjabardo]

So here we are talking in general terms and you come with one instance of one guy screwing up. Hitler obviously screwed up many more times - he lost the war and it certainly was not because of jet bombers. But at the beginning of the war many people saw that everything he did worked wonderfully even though in retrospect we might see the seeds of failure.

All this doesn't change the fact that there was a lot of innovation going on even if much was wasted by a single man. The relevant question is whether this innovation was a result of or at least amplified by Nazism. In my opinion there could have been a short term boost to innovation even though Germany was loosing many of its best minds throughout the 30's and in the long run (15 years only) it proved to be a disaster, not only for Germany but for much of Europe. In retrospect this end result might have been inevitable even in 1935 but it certainly wasn't obvious to people then in Germany and elsewhere. Some people saw it coming though - think of all the people from all over the world volunteering to fight in Spain in 1936 and 1937.

Your example is another evidence to my point. Thank you.

Re:"Homegrown"?

[arglebargle_xiv]

I was actually going to quote the same line:

The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture [...] It is believed that the Loongson family of processors, including the ShenWei SW-3 found in Sunway, were created by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU.

Of course it had to done by reverse-engineering an Alpha, because there's no way that a mere chinaman could possibly create their own CPU. I mean just think of the implications! That'd practically be admitting that they can think!

(Hint: Loongson/Godson is MIPS32/MIPS64, and MIPS64 != Alpha. The entire claim seems to be based on this piece of nonsense, which concludes that the Loongson/Godson MIPS device is actually an Alpha because it has, hold on for it, "128-bit system bus, I$ and D$ 8KB, four-issues superscalar, two integer and two floating-point", and a few others. Ah yes, how could we have missed such conclusive evidence).

The first knockoff supercomputer.

[sethstorm]

The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture, which China â" as in, the country itself â" probably reverse engineered from a DEC Alpha CPU in 2001 and has been developing ever since.

This should be a greater argument against handing technology to China, since they just simply copy off of everyone else.

It's the truth, no matter how far you modbomb.

Re:The first knockoff supercomputer.

[bmo]

>It's the truth, no matter how far you modbomb.

You get modbombed because you don't bring anything to the discussion except "hate china" and your ideas are lame. Supply them with faulty technology like you suggested in a previous message? Dude, they can get the latest processors off the shelf. And it's not like they don't have fabs for making their own. We gave it to them, willingly.

So if you have anything to say bad about anybody, maybe you should look at US businesses, who in their greed for short term gains, decided to hand the Chinese everything they wanted.

I don't fault the Chinese for anything they do now. I do fault US boards and CEOs for fucking everyone here for a quick buck.

So yeah, you get modbombed because you're not contributing.

Have a nice day.

--
BMO

Re:The first knockoff supercomputer.

[zill]

reverse engineered

Licensed from MIPS.

DEC Alpha CPU

Loongson is MIPS-compatible.

in 2001

The company that makes Loongson was founded in 2002.

Wow, almost every single word in that clause is wrong.

Re:The first knockoff supercomputer.

[WindBourne]

While I agree that us Businesses AND politicians (W was the best friend that China had with his tax break and .75T/year deficits) deserve a lot of blame. China's actions have over and over been illegal from POV of WTO/IMF and even the 2000 accord with USA. Even now, their requiring companies to build there, but not import is illegal. Obama SHOULD have done something by now, but .....

Re:The first knockoff supercomputer.

[bmo]

Nope. Not gonna blame China.

I blame Texas Instruments and others. I blame TI for closing their Attleboro MA plant and shipping everything off, including the engineering, to China.

Then there was AT Cross. Back when you wanted a "fancy pen" in the 70s and 80s, you bought a Cross pen. What did AT Cross do? Pick up and ship everything off to China from Lincoln RI. No, it's not high tech, but the thinking is the same.

Those are just local examples I can think of off the top of my head.

Not blaming China anymore. I blame US.

--
BMO

Re:The first knockoff supercomputer.

[Anonymous Coward]

...China's actions have over and over been illegal from POV of WTO/IMF...

Your're worried about what WTO might think about this? Who cares what *any* unelected organizations think about anything. Those groups exist to perpetuate copyright laws, patent laws, and trade laws for the advantage of multinational companies. Those groups will isolate a country and starve its citizens to make a few bucks for their masters.

Do the world a favour and kill a banker today!

Re:The first knockoff supercomputer.

[daem0n1x]

Everybody copies everything. Could you create a decent modern microprocessor on your own starting from middle-age technology? Guess not. So, are you a copycat?

Re:The first knockoff supercomputer.

[WindBourne]

That is funny. I was looking at buying a cross pen about 6 months ago and noticed that I could not find a single one made in America. All were Chinese. So, I skipped them. Pretty damn sad.

Re:The first knockoff supercomputer.

[poity]

"I don't fault the Chinese for anything they do now."

Thing is, while Americans are waking up to the misdeeds done unto them, China still gets away with "fucking everyone" to help their economy -- socialized health care is long gone, unions are merely a facade, and minimum wage is 1000 yuan a month in cities where average rent is 1500+, in their places are entirely government funded start-ups put into private hands, rising tax rebates for export companies to offset increasing foreign tariffs, and crackdowns where stories like Scott Olsen's are so myriad that society is numb to them.

It is the same story as in the US of taking money from private citizens to fund the captains of industry and their economic war machines, only to an even greater degree for the sake of helping China catch up. The sad fact we've come to realize is that the country that can more easily oppress can also more easily tip the economic scales in their favor. Yet there are those like you who would, in their dissatisfaction with the old bullies, pave the way and make excuses for the new ones.

Re:The first knockoff supercomputer.

[bmo]

Speidel was literally down the street from me by 3 miles in "The Jewelry District." Providence RI was known as the jewelry capital of the world at one point.

They shipped off to China too. Want a twisty metal band for your watch? Can't get a US made one anymore.

--
BMO

Re:The first knockoff supercomputer.

[bmo]

There is no scam without a greedy mark.

Chew on that for a while.

--
BMO

Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[sethstorm]

A few rounds of subtly defective technologies, and perhaps China might learn not to copy off the US.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[SharkLaser]

Everyone bases their stuff on something. Even in the West. Note that it said it got start from that. Everything we do in our every day lives in based on something too, and so are all US products.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[Anonymous Coward]

As if they give a fuck if something works or not. Everything is either a success or a "success".

The supercomputing power "war" kinda reminds me of the ol' console wars from the 90s....

New Supercomputer to utilize Blast Processing! ...GOTTA GO FAST!

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[Anonymous Coward]

The rise of the West in the last few hundred years can been attributed to the Renaissance

The Renaissance happened partly/mostly due to a bunch of Italians rediscovering ancient Greek and Roman knowledge. Ergo, the West as we know it got to where it is by copying the Greeks/Romans

But of course, it's also around the time of Renaissance that the modern notion copyright and intellectual property surfaced.

Thus, we have the doublethink that makes it OK for the West to copy ancient Greeks/Romans, but not OK for other cultures to copy the West.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[gl4ss]

anyhow. the west can just start copying and reverse engineering china if it goes to that.

in either case, it's better tech for everyone.

also - one important points in kicking off the renaissance was this: stealing shit from CHINA.

gunpowder? check.
advanced principles on war and administration? check.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[MichaelKristopeit352]

that is why china's supercomputer has a turbo button on it.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[aliquis]

A few rounds of subtly defective technologies, and perhaps China might learn not to copy off the US.

Ah, you mean like your budget, the FED and the deficiencies?

So that's what they was! ;D

If China goes forward and the US backward I'm not sure you'll be that proud and sure they can't innovate or research on their own in a few decades. But Chinese are inferior? Right? Just like the Japanese.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[ColdWetDog]

He said "subtly defective" not "Batshit insane"

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[LordLimecat]

GP is exactly right about how ridiculous it is though, when your proof that the West is going to get outcompeted is that China has a chip thats some 5-6 years old in fabrication tech.
Its sort of like saying "Africa is starting to build out its basic infrastructure; surely this means in a few years they will be surpassing the west in power generation". Yea, except that doesnt follow at ALL.

I mean, seriously, youre comparing a 60nm chip to Intel and AMD's stuff? Get real. What were costs of production? What is its real-world performance? Etc etc.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[Anonymous Coward]

The same nation that built its own industrial base by NOT respecting patents held by others?

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Arabs were far more important for the start of the Renaissance in the West than China.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[LifesABeach]

The world is working Quantum Computer solutions, and china comes up this?! I just thought that china could do better.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[LifesABeach]

After all the time and resources spent, can this thing play Battlefield3?

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[LifesABeach]

With all due respect to the Japanese, they did build a computer one layer of molecules thick. But no bench marks when playing WM3 yet, that's really a shame.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[khallow]

Thus, we have the doublethink that makes it OK for the West to copy ancient Greeks/Romans, but not OK for other cultures to copy the West.

All this ancient knowledge has been in the public domain for at least a thousand years by the time of the Renaissance. Even now, copyright doesn't extend to a thousand years. So there's no "doublethink" going on here. It is worth noting that virtually everyone who now embraces IP has gone through a phase when they didn't. Most took advantage of someone who did respect IP. There's some hypocrisy there.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[WorBlux]

Probably not, lacks the single thread performance, and isn't an x86 architechtrure. OTOH, it may be used to design some of the weapon systems to be seen in WWIII.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[cavreader]

The Chinese economy is tied tightly to the US economy. The US represents almost 1/3 of their export market. And other countries can not pick up the slack because the economic down turn cycle is international in nature not local. Those few countries not experiencing any problems are in no position to replace the reduction in US imports from China. China is also experiencing some difficulties with their economy. Inflation has outpaced their ability to manipulate their currency to create cheap export prices and they now have competitors that can compete using low labor costs which is the only advantage China's export market has ever had. They are certainly not known for quality. China is now posting trade deficits after years of surpluses. And the most important item is that China produces nothing the US can not buy else where or manufacture domestically. On the other hand China has increased their dependency on food imports from the US by a factor of 6 over the past 8 years. People have been predicting Chinese domination for the past 10 years and while they have grown they are still about 4 trillion dollars short on GDP and the US is still ranked the #1 manufacturer in the world. Sort of looks like the never ending prediction of Linux taking over the desktop. China's technology is built on technology they have either bought or stolen from others. It's a smart strategy on their part because they can dispense with all of the costly R&D and start building right away. They purchased their entire space related technology turnkey from the Russian fire sale when the USSR broke up.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[physburn]

Er, because Concorde was made by the British and French, the word Concorde being french for treaty. As a brit I not that proud of Concorde (better than a DeLoren though), seeing as it was never profitable and its one crash ground the whole fleet for good. But a plane far in advance of it time it was.

---

Aerospace Industry Feed @ Feed Distiller

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheesh- Give them a break, dude... They can't steal it all overnight.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, you mean like your budget, the FED and the deficiencies?

Exactly! And when they copy those, they'll end up with The Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, and the ever-popular Down to the Countryside Movement...But hey, I'm sure you think that they can afford to lose tens of millions of citizens at a time, right?

... you'll be that proud and sure they can't innovate or research on their own in a few decades.

Unlikely- Innovation doesn't exactly run rampant through that culture- Too many consequences to risk the trials and failures that are necessary to foster innovation.

Just like the Japanese.

Yes, after the allies helped rebuild their economy from 1945 to 1952, and for years after that, the Japanese economy was closed to the west while the west was wide open to Japanese goods? While William Edwards Deming was teaching Japanese industry total quality management? Yep, we're lucky the Japanese didn't innovate us to death after WWII.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainly because the US of A didnt invent a bad one let alone a working one nor a jump jet either.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[LifesABeach]

It's worthless then, I'll move along.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[symbolset]

And the patents on that processor are expired anyway. The work is rightly in the public domain. Why not use it?

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[WorBlux]

No not completely, just for what you'd want in a desktop system. If you just wan't to crunch a lot of numbers, it's not a bad choice.

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[uninformedLuddite]

Is that the new Crysis?

Re:Why can't the US just give them a bad Concorde?

[sethstorm]

The point is to give them something that is designed to fail, but only when all the pieces are assembled and implemented - much like how the Soviets had copied the Concorde, but failed.

Good for China

[Anonymous Coward]

And so it begins ...

You know what's great about this?

[Anonymous Coward]

The super computer that eventually gains sentience and takes over the world will probably be American. USA #1!

Re:You know what's great about this?

[WindBourne]

I doubt it. The control chips will be too busy arguing amongst themselves and that will prevent it.

Re:You know what's great about this?

[turkeyfish]

If anyone in the US is going to build a sentient computer, they are going to have to keep the republicans away from it.

I don't quite understand

[the_humeister]

Why would they reverse engineer an Alpha chip in order tp make aIPS chip? If I were them, I'd one of the OpenSPARC cores.

Re:I don't quite understand

[zill]

If I were them, I'd one of the OpenSPARC cores.

You a verb there.


From wikipedia:

In 2007, a deal was reached by MIPS Technologies and ICT. STMicroelectronics bought a MIPS license for Loongson, and thus the processor can be promoted as MIPS-based or MIPS-compatible instead of MIPS-like.

In June 2009, ICT licenced the MIPS32 and MIPS64 architectures directly from MIPS Technologies.

In August 2011, Loongson Technology Corp. Ltd. licensed the MIPS32 and MIPS64 architectures from MIPS Technologies, Inc. for continued development of MIPS-based Loongson CPU cores.

Yet another FUD article trolling for xenophobic reactions.

Re:I don't quite understand

[jandrese]

The article is not very well written, but I think the story is that the Chinese firm reverse engineered a DEC Alpha to start making MIPS compatible chips, and then in 2007 went ahead and just bought a license from MIPS so they could actually call themselves MIPS compatible instead of just MIPS like.

The only problem with this is that Alpha is not MIPS. IIRC Alpha was at least partially derived from MIPS, so this isn't entirely improbable however.

So I guess the timeline is: 2001, Chinese firm buys a DEC Alpha, reverse engineers it. In 2002 they form a company that mass produces the knockoffs. In 2007 they buy a license from MIPS for marketing/sales purposes (maybe getting some ISA modernization as well?). 2011 they have a ton of chips installed in China's first supercomputer.

The only question left in my head is: Why Alpha? In 2001 DEC was already killing Alpha off. In 2011 terms that chip has got to be quite a few generations behind. The low power consumption might reflect a relatively low IPC. It's possible this supercomputer is built with 8,704 ARM-level cores, except that they'll probably have full up FPUs since this is a supercomputer.

Re:I don't quite understand

[Curlsman]

Not DEC, seemingly, but COMPAQ via Tru64 on Alpha. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tru64_UNIX "A Chinese version of Tru64 UNIX named COSIX was jointly developed by Compaq and China National Computer Software & Technology Service Corporation (CS&S)[10]. It was released in 1999."

Re:I don't quite understand

[Unoriginal_Nickname]

"Why Alpha?" indeed.

According to my back-of-the-napkin calculations, and their claimed performance, each CPU in this supercomputer is comitting 6.5 floating point instructions per clock. I don't know the specific engineering details of this new CPU, but the one it's based on is four-issue superscalar with two floating point units, one for multiplication and the other for all other operations. Either they made extensive modifications, in which case I would question why they needed to license the design in the first place, or their performance measurements are fabricated. I'm leaning toward the latter. Either way, their floating point performance is a complete joke compared to even low-end GPUs.

One thing to note is that FLOPS is completely useless as a measure for performance. Basically it is up to the supercomputer vendor to choose between measuring only the fastest operations (adds,) or to use some arbitrary convention for weighting the other operations (multiply, divide, sqrt.) They also eliminate all overhead; they run benchmarks with all operands in registers, eliminate read-after-write dependencies, and only measure after the branch predictor and I-cache/trace cache are in steady state. Completely unrealistic. The entire supercomputer industry is like this, by the way. (Even if they really did make their CPU 7- or 8-way superscalar, any realistic workload is going to cut the instruction throughput by more than half.)

Re:I don't quite understand

[unixisc]

That's what struck me as well. If it's built out of 8704 Longson chips (how did they come up w/ that number, instead of 8192?), it's ultimately a MIPS based supercomputer. How would they reverse engineer an Alpha to get this? All the Alpha IP now belongs to Intel, as Compaq had sold it to them when it ended the Alpha. And even if the Alpha was partly derived from MIPS (actually, it was more based on DEC's PRISM), it doesn't mean that Alpha specific technologies worked their way into MIPS IV & V. And even if the Chinese reverse engineered an Alpha, why make MIPS compatible chips when they could have simply made Alphas? DEC would have been more than happy to give them a license - this is probably a considerable number of CPUs sold.

And if they made 8704 of these into a supercomputer, and they reverse engineered an Alpha, why not just buy 8192 Itaniums from Intel? More likely than not, they'd have gotten a volume discount, and since they'd not be running emulated software such as HP/UX or Windows Server 2003, they could have fine tuned an OS natively for this platform. Maybe something like OpenIndiana.

Re:I don't quite understand

[Pence128]

The ShenWei page on Wikipedia says 140Gflops at 1.1Ghz over 16 cores, or 8flopc. That implies single precisions on a 256 bit vector FPU like the Loongson's

Re:I don't quite understand

[Unoriginal_Nickname]

That's certainly possible, or two 256-bit SIMD units (one add/div/sqrt, one mult) at double precision. That means a lot of overhead is showing up in the supercomputer benchmark, though. Usually they aren't so honest.

Re:I don't quite understand

[Anonymous Coward]

The article is a load of crap. They are mixing up this chip, which is called SW-3, with Longsoon aka Dragon Chip. Longsoon is also an university project but was done in another Chinese university. The objective was to have a general purpose CPU which could be used just about anywhere. It was MIPS derived but avoided the use of MIPS hardware patents so it did not have a full implementation of the ISA. The chip was embargoed outside China because of this. Eventually the Chinese paid MIPS for a license, so it could be sold outside the US. That chip is manufactured outside China because there is an embargo on China acquiring the most recent lithography equipment from the West. When was the last time you saw an Alpha processor with 16-cores? Answer is never.

Reverse engineered Alpha??

[Archibald Buttle]

Why would Loongson/Godson be reverse engineered from a DEC Alpha? It implements the MIPS instruction set, not Alpha. Wouldn't it have been easier for them to reverse-engineer a MIPS chip? Doesn't the evidence seem to indicate that it's a genuinely independent implementation of MIPS?

The only source of this speculation I have found is just the extremetech article that has been linked to. My googling is showing nothing else to back this up.

Re:Reverse engineered Alpha??

[hackingbear]

Doesn't the evidence seem to indicate that it's a genuinely independent implementation of MIPS?

Because most of US already believe that everything that China made must be an exact replica of whatever we have.

Re:Reverse engineered Alpha??

[peter303]

Its whatever computer files can be copied at a given time. Perhaps DEC security was a bit loose in the late 1990s.

Re:Reverse engineered Alpha??

[Anonymous Coward]

The instruction set is just a layer on top of the actual processor. The Pentium Pro wasn't an x86 processor, it was a RISC processor with an X86 instruction set on top. You could put a MIPS instruction set on top of the Alpha circuitry. Why you would do that instead of using the Alpha instruction set, I don't know. Or you could steal parts of Alpha and put it into your home grown MIPS processor.

Not saying that happened as I have no clue what did happen.

Re:Reverse engineered Alpha??

[grumpyman]

Totally agree. Just look at eldavojohn comment above - his argument is based on the two claims "home-grown" and "reverse engineering", which are nowhere to be found except the extremetech article itself. With the general /. populace sentiment, we DESERVE the patent system that we have because we're asking for it.

Re:Reverse engineered Alpha??

[Archibald Buttle]

Of course what's daft about this is that there seems to be no evidence that the ShenWei SW-3 is a Loongson/Godson chip. There is nothing to be found on what the instruction set of the CPU is, and no evidence that it implements the MIPS instruction set - any googling for that only brings you back to this story.

There is some speculation that the ShenWei's CPUs were "inspired" by the DEC Alpha. Quite what that means is anyone's guess. Again, there is very little evidence to be found on this subject, just a blog posting or two.

This seems like a case of lousy, biased, reporting.

Re:Reverse engineered Alpha??

[evilviper]

there seems to be no evidence that the ShenWei SW-3 is a Loongson/Godson chip. There is nothing to be found on what the instruction set of the CPU is, and no evidence that it implements the MIPS instruction set

The MIPS based Loongson/Godson chip is the only reasonably advanced processor known to be developed in China, and the government has spent obscene amounts of money over the past decade+ on it.

It's extremely unlikely domestic Chinese companies have secretly developed the capability to design some other architecture than Loongson, just a few years behind the state of the art. The alternative is that they up and stole a core design, and did minor modifications on it, which they are very well known to have done time and again.

Personally... I like this development. MIPS is a damn good design. If domestic Chinese design and manufacturing result in a dirt cheap MIPS architecture to compete with x86 and ARM, it could only be a good thing, and I'd jump at the chance.

Re:Fuck China.

[muckracer]

> We should refuse to do business with them while we still can.

In other news, most "american" retail chains are closing for business...

Re:Fuck China.

[Anonymous Coward]

If I ever go back in time to 1980, I'll be sure to let them know that.

But 30 minutes later...

[RapidEye]

Sure it is fast, but 30 minutes after the program is done, you're hungry again...

Alpha or MIPS, pick one!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's either MIPS 64, or Alpha architecture, it isn't both. Alpha would have been reverse Engineered, but MIPS would be more likely give that it's well documented in Hennessey and Patterson, which is probably the most commonly used text on processor architecture.

Re:Alpha or MIPS, pick one!

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh, it's that simple? Shit, I thought processor design was complex. Perhaps there's a lot more than the instruction set and skeleton. Maybe there was some magic in Alpha that can be used in a MIPS instruction set. But what do I know, you obviously are an expert in your field.

Re:Alpha or MIPS, pick one!

[cyfer2000]

TFA is totally messed up. The ShenWei chips are NOT based on the Loongson/Godson/MIPS architecture.

Re:Alpha or MIPS, pick one!

[unixisc]

I agree - the design of such a thing would have to be open, and one doesn't get it from Hennesey & Patterson. One would need the HDL models of that. But I thought that MIPS had already licensed it to Longson.

Other than that, the Chinese could have just approached Intel and asked to buy all Alpha rights, and made a CPU that way.

Rumor has it

[C_Kode]

Rumor has it, this new Chinese super computer hacked into itself.

Inflammatory headline

[gewalker]

oligarch of the west
  -- Clearly the proletariat masses of the United States have no say in politics nor are allowed to own stock in capitalist corporations.

developing hordes of the east
-- Clearly the east is nothing more than the extended family of Genghis Khan ravening the other nations

Shame on you for posting a story like this instead of simply reporting the actual news

Reverse engineering feat

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sunway uses the ShenWei SW-3 1600, a 16-core, 64-bit MIPS-compatible (RISC) CPU."
"The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture, which China — as in, the country itself — probably reverse engineered from a DEC Alpha CPU"

So, they reversed engineered DEC Alpha CPU into 64-bit MIPS-compatible CPU ?

Re:Reverse engineering feat

[jones_supa]

That went past me too.

Re:Reverse engineering feat

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, it doesn't seem to bother the guys who'd rather discuss China-vs-the-West than the technology. Rather it highlights how those threads are based on feelings and prejudices instead of any facts.

Lesson in Communism for you, Pal

[rubycodez]

China of course has Oligarchs and Plutocrats. All major "communist" systems have them. That's because real communism can't exist on anything on the scale bigger than a hippie commune.

Re:Lesson in Communism for you, Pal

[rahvin112]

The Jews have been practicing what is essentially a fairly pure form of ideal socialism in their Kibbutz (communal farms) and have been doing so for a VERY long time. They are successful for one very important reason. Although all material goods are shared those that don't contribute are kicked out of the Kibbutz. So if your the lazy asshole that wants to live off the work of everyone else they simply vote you out of the Kibbutz and away you go. Pure socialism is an egalitarian society and it only truly works when those egalitarian principles are embraced by everyone and the losers that want to work the system get tossed out.

Now I should point out that some of the Kibbutz in Israel are quite large on the order of several thousand people in the largest. Although you might consider that small the principle is established and it could scale, again as long as everyone abides the same work ethic and world views. What disrupts the system is those that aren't abiding the egalitarian view of minimalist lifestyle and shared needs and coping. It's structured very much like our tribal past where needs were joint and everyone worked for the common good of the community rather than to acquire material possessions.

But you are right, China is a totalitarian society, not some egalitarian society where everyone gets a free shake. Corruption is endemic in the communist party, as the leaders don't answer to anyone but their superiors it creates a culture that inspires and almost requires abuse. Until that system is gone they will always be handicapped both culturally and economically. But they do need to be worried, the second round of economic disaster hitting Europe has about a 90% chance to stall the US recovery. Inflation is running high (around 9% las I saw), they have a HUGE debt problem (prefecture level) that is going to make the greek default look like childs play and they are at a tipping point where all those manufacturing jobs flee back to the US/Europe. The communists are so worried about it they promised their industrialists they will hold dollar pricing parity, something I might add that isn't going to go over well in either Europe or the US.

China has issues that dwarf the petty stuff the Europeans and Americans deal with. Economic problems pale in comparison to raging ethnic discrimination (which is ultimately going to boil into ethnic unrest), corruption (entrenched mafia, endemic corruption in the communist party), localized debt defaults in the trillions (there are some prefectures where debt interest exceed tax revenues, and all this debt is carried by "private" banks to conceal how bad it is), dramatic labor problems, pollution, a coming population implosion that's going to decimate their social safety net (in 20 years the retired will outnumber the working). I could go on and on but ultimately China has a lot of internal problems to solve. Personally I don't know that they can pull it off without the type of social upheaval that puts all the communist leaders in the guillotine.

Re:Lesson in Communism for you, Pal

[rubycodez]

Those Israeli Kibbutz act within a realm supported by capitalism and also billions in overt and covert aid. So funny a first world country like Israel is such a bunch of moochers.

It's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

"China might learn not to copy off the US" every one seems to be mad at china for coping products.
Almost all countries in the west started out that way. USA became big on coping products from Europe and selling them cheap. most countries in europe got there by coping. But it's apparently a bad thing when a developing nation want to do the same thing that brought other countries to greatness

How long

[Yvan256]

How long before I can get a chinese laptop at the dollar store?

DMA

[tepples]

New Supercomputer to utilize Blast Processing!

What's so special about having a DMA unit? Because that's all Blast Processing ever was: Sega's name for the DMA unit in the Genesis memory controller.

WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

Drawing yet another battle line between the incumbent oligarchs of the West and the developing hordes of the East

Just when I thought my WoW addiction was over - I hate you Slashdot.

Homegrown?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing homegrown about china is the copy/paste function.

Re:Homegrown?

[GameboyRMH]

No, Apple invented copy & paste, it was first released for iOS, remember?

Built without Intel or AMD's PERMISSION more like

[Anonymous Coward]

China, stealing design ideas from every company stupid enough to build a manufacturing plant there....

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

[madhatter256]

A chinese person will reply that there was no egg, simply a reversed-engineered chicken to form another chicken :)

Re:Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

[misosoup7]

A chinese person will reply that there was no egg, simply a reversed-engineered chicken to form another chicken :)

Funny, but a Chinese person would reply an egg, because the all that is in the universe was born out of an egg in Chinese mythology. See Pangu.

Ten year term for mask works

[tepples]

However, outside of ethics, isn't it illegal to copy a copyrighted design?

I haven't read China's copyright law, but at least in my home country, exclusive rights in chip designs expire after ten years, unlike other exclusive rights under copyright law. Even the chip's patents last longer than those.

All western tech companies to disappear

[WindBourne]

The fast that companies like Intel, AMD, Dell, IBM, HP, and esp. Apple, move their tech to China, the faster that these companies will disappear. Chinese gov. is simply using their greed against them. Smart on their part. Stupid on the companies, and America's as well. Hopefully, Google with Motorola will change that. What has to happen is that Motorola needs to focus on top products that get demand, while not taking the GM/Harvard finance MBA approach to businesses.

Re:All western tech companies to disappear

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Pretty much

US companies are foolishly destroying themselves by doing business in china.

Re:All western tech companies to disappear

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey CEOs don't give a fuck about the companies they manage because they know they will get their fucking golden parachutes and then be hired again by other corrupt board of directors and the cycle will continue. The joys of capitalism.

Re:All western tech companies to disappear

[WindBourne]

That is not capitalism. That is simply the set-up the way that we have it. Since it is set-up this way, I think that we need to return to the per-reagan time that prevented Executives from owning stock, OR better yet, require that all employees including executives to own only employee stock. That way, you remove the incentive from the employees and executives to short companies.

Re:All western tech companies to disappear

[ColdWetDog]

Oops. A small flaw in your argument:

China has now become an enormous market in and of itself. Reference China being Apple's #2 market (not Europe, not India, not Canada). Those companies that you complain about may have simply seen into the future, realized that manufacturing in the US wasn't an economically viable proposition in the near term and then found that, as the "Western" marketplace slowed down, China and the rest of the developing world can help to pick up the slack.

It's the ebb and flow of Empire. Has happened ever since humans grouped into tribes. There will be relative winners and losers and for US centric folks, it rather looks like we're on the shorter, blunter end of the stick economically. The Chinese have a ways to go before they are completely dominant in the world economy - they're making some smart moves - and dumb ones.

The problem is that the US (and the West) seems to be mostly making dumb moves so it looks bad.

And then there are some issues that will effect us all (Climate Change, resource allocation and other effects of 7 billion humans) so, as the old Chinese curse goes "May you live in interesting times".

Let 'em copy reverse engineer

[Anonymous Coward]

The patent system is broken anyway.

Ohhh, sorry, it's not an apple thread so all the commenters positions are different....

Yeah, funny however that this story is written by

[SmallFurryCreature]

Yeah, funny however that this story is written by an American. Who invented the first computer again? Where was the jet engine developer? Radar?

Pot calling kettle, come in kettle.

deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me I've heard all this before with one Japan not that many years ago.
I even remember Japanese interests embroiled in FBI industrial sting operations.
It also seems to me nobody look askance at Japanese tech news much anymore.
Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it?

I'm sure we can guess this computer's purpose...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure we can guess this computer's likely purpose from a possible list:

1: RSA factoring, or brute forcing various crypto algorithms implementations. Big payoff if a CA root key is nabbed.
2: Since this supercomputer has a lot of oomph in the integer processing line, fast I/O for data mining and being able to correlate events. Perfect for tracking down "anonymous" dissidents by looking at the way they write and sites they use.
3: Program simulation to help find security issues in commonly used operating systems, for use by PLA "cyber-soldiers".
4: Financial market scenario planning, to know where to have their companies dump goods and why. Take the solar industry and the alleging that China is bankrupting solar companies in the US by selling their panels and such for cheaper than they can build them
5: Currency forecasting to decide when to let the yuan separate from the dollar to ensure the most economic carnage in the West.

Standing on the shoulders of others

[rickb928]

I had an all-to-rare chance to chat with someone I know in the chip industry. Among his greatest challenges right now is how to 'characterize' performance and failures. The state of the art is so profoundly advanced that production facilities are using what are truly research technologies to deal with their production needs.

To put it differently, imagine that mainstream medicine was being manufactured at university research labs, using the research facilities as if they were production lines. State of the art chip fabs are pretty much at that level.

His assessment was that China barely has close-to-useful chip research going on, and they can only indulge in truly state of the art research if they steal/buy the necessary hardware AND personnel to operate it. And they haven't been caught kidnapping researchers. And their plants in U.S. universities haven't been smuggling such equipment, though he can't guess as to what they may have been able to purchase on the Q.T. with the necessary government assistance. And that's what he fears, that the Chinese will draw to parity with the rest of the world not through their own efforts, but through espionage, subterfuge, and the willing accomplices in other governments that see the opportunity for growth but not the opportunity for dominance.

And then, he thinks, a transcendent China will fail to exhibit the creativity to develop a lead, and will merely out-price the competition. He truly only fears his employer will somehow squander or fail to maintain their currrent dominant position, and be reduced to price wars, which is, in his opinion, the way to their demise.

So far, no sign that they are letting up on the innovation acclerator.

China is still considering it a victory to copy 20-year old technology. We should hope this is their model for a while longer.

ps - He thinks we will see a push to U.S. manufacturing of semiconductors, electronics devices, and such when it becomes even more evident that we cannot trust Chinese-made devices. UEFI-based PCs will make this even more evindent than Cisco hardware, he thinks, and will first bring Korean and Japanese manufacturers a new opportunity. Then the DOD will realize they can't trust even the solder from China. Then we can be honest about this issue.

will always be behind if they depend on espionage

[peter303]

fro computer designs or any other technology (which seems to be most of their high tech industries).

Bad Day for Summaries

[Nom du Keyboard]

Today seems a particularly bad day for Slashdot summaries. The successful Russian Progress capsule launch making the booster man-safe again, and this one are the worst yet. Since when was the DEC Alpha MIPS based?

New Competition

[Froggels]

It's nice to see some potential competition for a change. IMO, for the past 2 decades the west has been getting way too soft.

So many comments bashing China...

[Oswald McWeany]

So many comments bashing China for improvising designs based on Western products.

Perhaps rather that criticising China for "stealing" our technology we should take a look at our OWN patent system.

Y'know, the phrase about standing on the shoulders of giants... not the one about them thinking you have stinky blood and eating you- the other one.

All todays technology is built on technology discovered by someone else. We need more companies in this country "stealing" from each other.

Network topology

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone with enough money can put 1000s of CPUs on a network, run a stupidly parallel benchmark, and claim a supercomputer. What really matters is the network topology. How long does it take a local node to access remote data? It looks like each CPU only has about 1 GB of memory in this system. For a massively parallel problem, I suspect this will put tremendous pressure on the on-board interconnect between the 16 (or 32?) nodes and the network interconnect to the remote nodes.

China builds first "Pirate Supercomputer"?

[h00manist]

> China — as in, the country itself — probably reverse engineered from a DEC Alpha CPU in 2001

So I guess that makes China first to implement Picasso/Jobs piracy-thievery ethics, thus inventing the first "Pirate Supercomputer".

Corsicans should be proud.

Re:China builds first "Pirate Supercomputer"?

[h00manist]

I wonder if they would consider lending the design for hosting a Chinese Pirate Bay, too. :)

Re:China builds first "Pirate Supercomputer"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Boring serious answer: Wouldn't be much use. These kind of things are set up for insane number crunching, not high I/O throughput.

I would love to buy an 8-Core godson

[Anonymous Coward]

to run OpenCL/Erlang on it. (if it is cheap enough)

Maybe we should get some copying in here?

[AtomicDevice]

Why is the gut american reaction "Look at those dirty Chinese copying our technology, they're just stupid copycats"

Why don't we instead think "Man, look how quickly they innovate on technology because they aren't locked down by stupid IP law, we should fix our IP law to help innovators (help them not fear being sued to death for improving a product and making a buck and some jobs)"

The fact of the matter is, if we don't "steal" IP (and by steal I mean share and protect inventors and innovators in a reasonable fashion, with sensible time limits and timely filings and better restrictions on what is patentable/copywriteable), some other country will, and they'll be the ones making the cash at the end of the day.

Re:Maybe we should get some copying in here?

[VocationalZero]

They are locked down by IP law, just not US IP law. Also, the "if we don't someone else will" has never been a valid argument.

How about we look at the facts for once without this stupid "us vs them" troll-fest mentality OH WAIT I'M ON SLASHDOT; I'LL STFU NOW *holds post up between mirrors*

Re:Maybe we should get some copying in here?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a very, very good point. The US is being crippled by its own IP laws and other countries have the freedom to develop whatever technology they want.

Re:Maybe we should get some copying in here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its ok.

While all this finger pointing is going on. China is doing and growing.

In the end everyone will have to pocket their fingers and start doing for themselves again or be left behind with China leading the way.

Imagine that.

Seems like history....

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.ushistory.org/us/25d.asp

"... The first factory in the United States was begun after George Washington became President. In 1790, SAMUEL SLATER, a cotton spinner's apprentice who left England the year before with the secrets of textile machinery, built a factory from memory to produce spindles of yarn. ..."

Re:Yeah, funny however that this story is written

[russotto]

Yeah, funny however that this story is written by an American. Who invented the first computer again?

Disputed; the US, UK, and Germany all have credible claims.

Where was the jet engine developer?

UK and Germany, but I believe the Germans got theirs running first.

Radar?

Most of the major players in WWII, and some minor ones. I believe the UK had the best system, but the US got naming rights.

Re:Yeah, funny however that this story is written

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand who invented the integrated circuit and the silicon diode?

Loaded and slightly racist lead-in . . .

[GodInHell]

Drawing yet another battle line between the incumbent oligarchs of the West and the developing hordes of the East

Hordes of the East? Seriously?

-GiH

Re:Loaded and slightly racist lead-in . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, do you even know what horde means? Clearly not. Take your racism somewhere else.

Re:Loaded and slightly racist lead-in . . .

[lennier]

Hordes of the East? Seriously?

Exactly, some of them play Alliance instead...

Re:Loaded and slightly racist lead-in . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

May i correct that on behalf of O.P.: the yellow peril of the East. that should help

Re:Loaded and slightly racist lead-in . . .

[misosoup7]

Can't wait until some Horde guild grabs a world first with only Pandarens. :)

Re:Loaded and slightly racist lead-in . . .

[misosoup7]

Better, but still xenophobic and racist...

Loongson is a licensed MIPs processor

[thesandbender]

Loongson is a licensed MIPs implementation. Apparently early versions even made sure to clear of patent issues by not implementing a few instructions. So the accusation of being an Alpha "rip-off" is 100% wrong.

Re:Loongson is a licensed MIPs processor

[WorBlux]

This processor mentioned is not a loongson.

Re:Loongson is a licensed MIPs processor

[thesandbender]

FTA (and the summary): The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture. Loongsoon is a family of chips... just like Core 2's, Bulldozer's, etc. They are MIPs based, not Alpha based.

So InfiniBand is a Chinese invention, now?

[gentryx]

Or to put it in a different way: a crucial part of super computers is always the network. It sets a super computer apart from a bunch of workstations. Sunway uses InfiniBand. Even if the components (NICs and switches) are build by Huawei, it's still no Chinese design. This isn't bad or dramatic, but it adds to the fact that this isn't a totally "homegrown" machine.

low power?

[Anonymous Coward]

| very low-power; it consumes just one megawatt

what thickness power lines does it need?

First in the world that doesn't use Intel or AMD?

[vAltyR]

The Slashdot posting states (perhaps correctly) that this is China's first HPC installation that doesn't use Intel or AMD processors, however, the article makes a bigger claim:

Second, this is the first significant high-power computing (HPC) installation in the world that doesn’t use Intel or AMD processors.

No matter how you look at it, it's wrong. According to the Top500, there are 45 supercomputers that use POWER processors, one that uses NEC processors, and two that use SPARC. In particular, the processors in the current fastest supercomputer, the K Computer in Japan, are SPARC processors built by Fujitsu.

not very good poker face

[Anonymous Coward]

Alot of detractors vehemently claiming the Chinese will never get anywhere scientifically because all they do is reverse engineering.
Well if you are so convinced of your superiority, many of you sure seem rather easily perturbed even at the suggestion that you might be full of shit.
Comon, you've already won. Dial back the unmistakable rage a few notches. Just sit back on your laurels and relax ;-)

Petaflops, not petaflop

[Anonymous Coward]

Otherwise FLoating point Operatiosn Per what!?

The S is for "seconds" It's not a pluralisation.

Re:Yeah, funny however that this story is written

[Anonymous Coward]

Magnetron

"the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores"

A DEC Alpha "rip-off" would be welcome...

[Anonymous Coward]

Progress and innovation are always built upon what comes before, and the Alpha would make a wonderful foundation for future microprocesors. However, through the seemingly limitless stupidity of HP, the DEC Alpha has been reduced to an existence as mere IP, and is now owned by Intel. They have abandoned it, and left it to rot though--so, why should we be upset? After the home grown disasters that are x86 and itanium, and selling off their ARM division, they sure could use a decent architecture.

Rather than the Chinese innovation in question, I am a hell of a lot more concerned about all of the US innovation that is being wasted thanks to terminally stupid intellectual property law. Innovation is irrelevant, if no one can actually put it to use.

It is 1 petaflopS - with an "s"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 1 petaflopS - The "s" is needed to denote that it's "per second"

Not impressed with any of these "supercomputers"

[scottbomb]

Anybody can tie a bunch of processors together and connect them to a thousand hard drives. Show me a screaming fast processor that breaks the 3 GHz ceiling (I hear AMD is working on 5GHz...) and I'll be impressed.

Re:Yeah, funny however that this story is written

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, funny however that this story is written by an American. Who invented the first computer again?

Disputed; the US, UK, and Germany all have credible claims.

Nope, there is no discussion. The first electronic programmable computer was the Colossus at Bletchley Park. The Americans didn't even get to have a programmable calculator until the end of the war (Eniac). So much for american pride. The zuse machine was not even a competitor please, its like saying the ABC was a rival to the Colossus. Get with the program, the British were the first to invent and deploy a fully operational 100% electronic programmable computer.

Where was the jet engine developer?

UK and Germany, but I believe the Germans got theirs running first.

Still, the first operational jet engine was developped in the UK. And the first civil jet airplane (De Havilland Comet) right after the war was you guessed it British. It would be years before the Americans could even put a commercial jet on the market. In fact the only jet airplane the Americans could field was the Shooting Star and that was 3 years after the end of WW2.

Radar?

Most of the major players in WWII, and some minor ones. I believe the UK had the best system, but the US got naming rights.

The British were those who contributed the most to this technology.
Yeah the US got the naming rights, but the technology was research and developed by you guessed it the British.

lol

[Anonymous Coward]

The loser that writes this article needs to do a little research. Bwahhahahahahahahaha

Just go and check out Wired's article.

Re:Not impressed with any of these "supercomputers

[Junta]

Anybody can tie a bunch of processors together and connect them to a thousand hard drives

You really have no idea whatsoever what is involved in these configurations. Network topologies to actually have those work *efficiently* together is not as simple as 'slap a bunch of ethernet switches together'.

Show me a screaming fast processor that breaks the 3 GHz ceiling (I hear AMD is working on 5GHz...) and I'll be impressed.

First off, what 3 Ghz ceiling? AMD and Intel both have processors that exceed that per-core. Second, GHz isn't everything (I thought most of the world learned that with Pentium 4's ludicrous clockspeeds yet crappy performance).

Per what? It's petaFLOPS. With an S.

[Anonymous Coward]

FLOPS stands for "FLoating-point Operations Per Second". You need the S.

Re:Not impressed with any of these "supercomputers

[jezwel]

The IBM zEnterprise System, introduced in July, 2010, supports up to 80 central processors of up to 5.2GHz

You are highly misinformed about the state of CPU's.

Re:Yeah, funny however that this story is written

[Anonymous Coward]

1: Germans

2: Germans, British a VERY close second

3: Germans

IN fact, pretty much everything of note has come from the Europeans...the Americans occasionally develop something , usually a commercialisation of something a German or Brit invented years previously anyway......like cars,and planes and light bulbs.

Re:First in the world that doesn't use Intel or AM

[misosoup7]

I'm pretty sure they meant in China, China hasn't built a supercomputer that didn't use Intel or AMD chips before this one. They were listing reasons why this computer is significant for China.

Yellow fever

[Meeni]

Some sort of yellow fever has fogged some minds here.

1. Even if chinese had copied 20 year old Alpha design, building a computer from DEC processors of 20 years ago would not make a petaflop machine. The chinese have -at least- improved and worked on the design to put it to parity with other chips (especially regarding power consumption per flop).
2. The ShenWay chip has a power/flop ratio that is truly among the best of current production. This is the metric that matters nowadays. This is indicative that chinese engineers can come up with something competitive on their own (even if starting from some decade old obsolete material).
3. Infiniband is a specification. It is unclear if the machine uses chinese made Infiniband, or has bought Infiniband network from US or Israeli companies (which are the two most prominent providers of the technology). If they use homemade Infiniband compliant chips, they have made the machine based on local tech only.
4. As somebody stated, network matters more in a supercomputer than processor. What makes Cray attractive is the Seastar interconnect, not the boring AMD chips. If they have not homemade the Infiniband switch (the most difficult part to design in a supercomputer), they still have some way to go.

And the OS it runs is???

[softcoder]

Once again we have an article about a supercomputer going nuts over a bunch of hardware, without mentioning the software.
A supercomputer is made out of multiple chips the way a house is made from bricks, but a pile of chips is no more a supercomputer than
a pile of bricks is a house.
So what software makes the supercomputer useful?

Beverly Hills?!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Rural China makes Appalachia look like Beverly Hills.

Beverly Hills?! Let us pray you are not talking about education level. Money, yes. Education? No, my son.

But, it may well be better than Arkansas: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/education/educational_attainment.html

Walk in peace!

Impressive

[bryan1945]

I would have thought that 8,700 abacuses would take more power than that.

Re:Yeah, funny however that this story is written

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, funny however that this story is written by an American. Who invented the first computer again? Where was the jet engine developer? Radar?

Pot calling kettle, come in kettle.

I really am having a hard time understanding what your point is, or how the "pot vs. kettle" has anything at all to do with this.
There is a massive difference between scientists and researchers advancing science by building on the ideas of others, and simply taking something and copying it.

But to answer your questions:

- The first computer was the Abacus, invented by the Babylonians.
- The first rocket was the Aeleopile, invented by the Greeks.
- The first radar would probably have to be credited to Hertz, who was German.

I'm using the first known person to come up with the idea or working model, since you appear to think that building on ANY prior knowledge by anybody else is the same thing as reverse engineering an older device and copying it directly.
It's not, which is why your comment is completely asinine, but hey I'm bored and even Trolls need to be fed.

innovation culture

[Anonymous Coward]

The only truly sustainable way to create a culture of innovation is to create a culture that's innovative at finding new ways to take credit for other's work, like pretending a 12 year old defunct processor is responsible for a supercomputer that uses 1/7 the power of the fastest in the US and run at 7/10 its speed.