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Russia, Europe Seek Divorce From U.S. Tech Vendors
dcblogs writes "The Russians are building a 10-petaflop supercomputer as part of a goal to build an exascale system by 2018-20, in the same timeframe as the US. The Russians, as well as Europe and China, want to reduce reliance on U.S. tech vendors and believe that exascale system development will lead to breakthroughs that could seed new tech industries. 'Exascale computing is a challenge, and indeed an opportunity for Europe to become a global HPC leader,' said Leonardo Flores Anover, who is the European Commission's project officer for the European Exascale Software Initiative. 'The goal is to foster the development of a European industrial capability,' he said. Think what Europe accomplished with Airbus. For Russia: 'You can expect to see Russia holding its own in the exascale race with little or no dependence on foreign manufacturers,' said Mike Bernhardt, who writes The Exascale Report. For now, Russia is relying on Intel and Nvidia."
For Russia: 'You can expect to see Russia holding its own in the exascale race with little or no dependence on foreign manufacturers,' said Mike Bernhardt, who writes The Exascale Report. For now, Russia is relying on Intel and Nvidia.
Do what the Chinese do and copy the hell out of Nvidia and Intel.
what's left but to flaunt it?
We'll probably have Petaflop computers on our desks, if not in our laps. Apparently so we can manage the bloat of operating systems (which will no longer be popping up balloons, but nagging you with voice and expecting voice back) and gigabyte webpages, which tell you nothing you can't see now, but are built layer upon layer of cruft.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
we once more have a broad set of different processors and architectures to choose from. Competition will stimulate more creative designs and solutions.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
"[Technology segment] is a challenge, and indeed an opportunity for Europe to become a global [segment] leader", said [person], who is the European Commission's project officer for [some thing].
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Russia doesn't have the silicon crystal production facilities, they'll be stuck using the same European, American and Japanese lithography tools everyone else does, no fabs, no economies of scales for production like Samsung, Intel, AMD, Toshiba, etc have.
It might not be China or Russia or not. It might be some other country or countries. But it *will* be someone. Yes, America will be surpassed and it won't be because somebody stole their precious "IP".
Microsoft forever, faggots, and there isn't a goddamned thing you can do about it.
I'm pretty sure the Russians could still hit Redmond with an ICBM.
look i grew up my whole life during the cold war, my dad worked on bombers, my uncles were in the navy / air force.
it was the same shit day after day : "The Russians dont know how to invent everything, they copy from us"
now the cold war ends. what do we find out?
The Soviets did quite a shitload of innovative, amazing stuff. They built a lunar rover, that i never was taught about in school. Their rocket program was amazing. Korolev was amazing. Sakharov invented a different way to do Hydrogen bombs - and then he became a dissident. The Soviet computers had some interesting features - there is a video of a physics-simulated cat on a BSEM6. Solzhenytsin's book The First Circle is about scientists working in a prison research institute... what were they working on? Voice print recognition. Sure, it was horrible, and in service of an evil state... but technologically they didn't copy anything from anyone. Then there are the late model SU and MiG jets. Not to mention the Mig 15 which killed our boys in Korea.
now people are saying all this shit about China. well, its bullshit. China will be 'non creative' until they invent some invisible airplane or something. They are people, and people are creative. Human beings are creative.
Its main purpose is for politicians to set themselves monuments. This "U.S. tech dependency" is also just a fiction.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What is it with this ?? How to lose a man and gain a women in 10 days ?? Pretty much all that is here anymore !! YOU SUCK !! Bring back the Taco man before I do something you will regret !!
I fear this is true. The remarkable shortage of visionaries in leadership positions handicaps US relative to nearly everyone else. ./ crowd should be working to counter. Much more important than which window manager to use.
Add the effect of the Wall Street/investment shysters and We are scrod (past pluperfect for the grammar nazis).
IMHO, this is the problem the
2012 will certainly not be a happy new year unless We make it better.
That is as cheerful as I can be.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
Way back in the beginning you could see them as single computers but nowadays a supercomputer looks more like a local network of computers or a local cloud/cluster. Where does the computer start and stop?
Science centers certainly need the computing power but I can't see how relevant it is to think of these specialized clusters as a single computer or how one rates against another. These clusters are constantly being upgraded and expanded. The interconnects and topology is the only interesting thing but you can't necessarily compare two systems since every system is specialized for certain calculations and software.
But that got harder when we shrunk our processes. That had the result of forcing them to learn how to design their own chips, thereby boosting their economy.
My cousin speaks fluent Russian. There is no room to stand let alone sit in his apartment because of all the giant stacks of books. I know enough Russian that I could tell what the books were about. All of them were advanced physics and electrical engineering texts.
The Russians are no fools. Their educational system is excellent. It had to be under the soviets to have any hope of them surviving the cold war.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I suppose they'll need it to do system-level simulations of their launch platforms and industrial processes. But, if their physical build processes are messed up, how are they going to validate the simulation?
One of the big things that improves the speed of innovation is the ability to fail. This is still one of the big problems that needs to be conquered. You need lots of groups trying different avenues to ferret out the key innovations that push the state of the art forward. One of the problems with the command-style-economies is that although they could build up industries efficiently, they are simultaneously captive to those industries by continued government funding resuting in economic inefficiency (in the best case), or a military/industrial complex (in the worst case). From what I can tell, basically you need lots of serial entrepenuers, copy-cat followers and venture capital to push tech forward.
Not to say that the USA has this problem licked (see the defense spending culture or wall street as examples), but there are no clear signs yet that china, europe or russia has a sustainable approach to this problem that the USA seems to have. If they get better at figuring out how to fund innovation and defund obsolete industries, they will probably have both the ingredients needed to create a sustainable tech revolution that could wean itself from the USA tech industry.
From what it appears, right now china and europe are in focus-on-money mode trying to attract multi-national corporate investment which gets lots of progress quickly, but doesn't seem that sustainable as the government is still picking the winners and losers (e.g. who gets the tax breaks and who gets the operating licences). I honestly don't follow the situation in russia very closely for tech, but my understand is that big investment is still mostly in traditional industries rather than tech (natural resource expliotation). If this is true, the result of this is a problem of not enough native customers for native tech companies (another problem for sustainable growth).
Not to say they won't get there, but at least it seems to me that the evidence isn't there that they are on the cusp of anything... Remember, the leaders/founders of Intel and Nvidia didn't just graduate from school and start billion dollar companies. They worked for other multi-million dollar companies before starting those companies. And not all of those people that worked for those same multi-million dollar companies and left to start companies went on to found billion dollar companies either. And it wasn't just about Intel and Nvidia either, if Applied Materials didn't exist, you probably wouldn't have Intel fabs (or TSMC fabs) and so-on and so-forth. A whole ecosystem of companies need to exist. And for each of them, there needed to be some losers for there to be winners and some people willing to take a chance to lose some money to make some money.
Education was only 1/2 the problem. Ironically, education is perhaps the easiest 1/2 to solve (in the USA, apparently we just import people to educate and to do the education).
Seems to me that China is well out their way to out innovate the US.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/21/us-china-patents-idUSTRE7BK0LQ20111221
For instance, F-35 JSF started its life as a carbon copy of Yak-141, blueprints for which Locheed Martin blatantly stole from Russians by first forming and then dissolving a "partnership" with the Yakovlev bureau all in the span of about a year. Don't believe me? Check out the videos below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23ohOKthO18 - Yak 141, circa 1987
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki86x1WKPmE - F-35, 2011
See other videos of Yak-141, and see it from the rear in particular. F-35 is a blatant copy, just with today's electronics and stealth.
As a scientific user of large HPC machines like Franklin, Hopper, HECToR etc., this race for exascale machines seems like the tail wagging the dog. There are currently very very few codes which can actually use an exascale supercomputer, due to the extreme parallelism needed. If you have to make use of several hundred thousand cores, anything beyond embarrassingly parallel montecarlo problems have problems moving data around. Something like Intel's Knight's Corner chip might help OpenMP-MPI hybrid codes, but a lot of conferences now are focussed on how to design codes to make use of these big machines. More useful would be to put the money into more smaller (say 100,000 core) machines, so more runs can be done with different inputs.
The CS guys love doing a single massive run which burns through CPU time on headline-grabbing number of processors, but actually that's not very useful for scientific research. More useful is to be able to run the code tens or hundreds of times with a quick turnaround (not waiting days in a queue) with different inputs. Whilst this exascale race is a good way to get money into the maths/CS labs, in my opinion it's not going to give the massive leap in understanding which is promised.
The situation is that the large operating system vendor (Microsoft) in the world hails from the US, and is prepared to do anything in order to maintain that position.
The largest Microprocessor vendor (Intel) hails from the US and is prepared to do anything in order to maintain that position.
The largest artistic software manufacturer (Adobe) in the world hails from the US and is prepared to do anything in order to maintain that position.
The list goes on...
Meanwhile, every country in the world gives them all the tools they need to in order to maintain that position (patents, insane copyright laws, etc.) We see that specifically with Apple, who does not like Android (which is a serious competitor on the mobile phone market for its iOS). Apple is using patents as an extortion mechanism and nobody is doing anything about it.
Until this legal environment, which favors large companies, is dealt with; the situation will remain the same. YOu see, the moment somebody has an interesting idea he's either bought out or destroyed by any of these companies.
The other aspect of the problem is that the US government refuses to do anything about this situation, while these very companies are killing the world economy.
You can idiot proof things only so much. Boeing is not immune from idiocy, and there are as many examples to that. Recall Aeroflot Flight 821 (aka Perm crash).
Talking about leading edge computing...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#November_2011
Top ten are all running Linux...
Trolling is a art!
I can understand why out of patriotism a country would want an industrial base in an important industry. What I don't understand is why someone would want to try and fail to reinvent or bypass existing working, advanced, advancing and optimized equipment for a task. To me as value added as the chips are, the real value add is in integrating them into a system and far above that again what you do with that system
What is more valuable? The price of your phone or computer and its associated network and maintenance and software costs, or what you do with it?
At some point a first order analysis of the real problem and real solution should be undertaken before you haul off and simply say, let's make it all here. Here is not necessarily better, and like Russian automobiles, it does make jobs, but it does not make better cars. There are a great deal of things Russians do well and they have perhaps the largest greenfield on the planet times 2 or 3, but it should be employed and exploited in a way that best serves the people and the continued rise of lifestyles, without necessarily targeting specific products like good old central planning did. It was not so good after all.
Merry Christmas to all especially in Russia and Europe.
JJ
we once more have a broad set of different processors and architectures to choose from. Competition will stimulate more creative designs and solutions.
We did! At one point, we had, aside from the Pentiums (and x86 derivatives from AMD, Cyrix & Centaur) RISC processors like MIPS, SPARC, POWER, Alpha, PA-RISC, Intergraph's Clipper, and maybe more.
Thanks to all the shakedowns in the 2000s, we're now reduced to just the x64, POWER and MIPS. ARM occupies the portable space, but not much above that. Thanks to that hype known as Itanium, Alpha & PA-RISC went under. Also, Microsoft neglecting the RISC versions of NT contributed to the demise of Alpha & decline of MIPS, while IBM failing to do OS/2-PPC ensured that PPC remained an Apple niche, until Apple tired of it.
Anyway, coming to Russia, if they want a processor not subject to any US laws, their choices are essentially ARM, which is quite inadequate for this applicaiton, or they could go w/ OpenRISC. They have the technical expertise to take such a design and run w/ it, and even build their own fabs anywhere in the country. Since they would be building from scratch, they can start w/ the latest foundry equipment and 12" wafers, and make quite an suite of products, not just CPUs. And if they don't want to risk w/ such an unproven architecture, they could license MIPS or POWER (just like Loongson), and build a supercomputer based on that. In fact, make a supercomputer farm somewhere in the Russian Arctic, have an open air circulation so that the ambient temperatures of the area touch those CPUs, which may result in being able to clock them to 5GHz. And build whatever massively parallel architecture they need.
Interesting point. I had all but forgotten about the 141, and it seems to never having entered service.
And yes, comparisons do reveal a certain similarity:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Yak-141_3D.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/F-35A_three-view.PNG
The F-35 do have a very different engine design tho.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
The two aircraft don't look anything like each other ...!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWS-FoXbjVI
"When you enough steal real best"
Very poor attempt at Russian. =)
You, sir, are a goddamn tease.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Russian copy of the US Space Shuttle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_%28spacecraft%29
moved much of their knowledge to China, the US gov. should divorce from US tech vendors as well. It is time to realize that the international companies like IBM, GE, Ford, Exon, GM, etc have no interest in US or even Western nations. Instead, they chase the almight dollar, or these days, the yuan.
American gov. needs to start funding local companies that develops and KEEPS tech here.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That would be the worst mistake in the history of the world. Times a thousand.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Yes I know - constant fly by wire problems and a bunch of planes lost with significant human death toll...
I don't think that's much of an accomplishment.
Russian copy of the US Space Shuttle .... built on German rocket technology .... built on principles in great part first outlined by Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
99.99% of "progress" is "stealing" ideas from each other and building on them.
U.S. Corporate greed (by off-shoring jobs and manufacturing) fueled this obvious eventuality. The stupid Bizz-Dorks (privileged, college educated, never held a real job a day in their lives) really believe that a company could not run without them. They thought that they could just pocket the profit, and sit here in their office towers, while they were robbed blind of their intellectual property.... thinking it was safe because somebody over seas told them so.
Why on earth would anyone in their right mind give a person a gun so that they could be shot in the head with it? Probably because the top corporate echelon have become rich, live in gated communities, and don't much care about anything else. How many of these bastards live in Dubai? Tons of em... and patriots all, like patriotic companies like Halliburton for example (with headquarters now in Dubai).
The remarkable shortage of visionaries in leadership positions handicaps US relative to nearly everyone else. ./ crowd should be working to counter. Much more important than which window manager to use.
Add the effect of the Wall Street/investment shysters and We are scrod.... IMHO, this is the problem the
The Slashdot crowd doesn't have any ability to change these things, so it's pointless to tell them they should. The Wall Street shysters are good buddies with their (paid) friends in Washington, so the politicians will happily do whatever the banksters want. Why should the politicians listen to the Slashdot crowd? Does the Slashdot crowd have lots of "campaign contributions" to outweigh the hefty "donations" from their lobbyists? Of course not. So it's really more productive to argue about window managers than these other issues that we have no power over.
Face it, the US government is totally corrupt, and nothing is going to save it now. It would be like a Roman citizen without any ties to the imperial government trying to effect change from within; they'll either be ignored or painted as a traitor and crucified, shortly before some invaders riding elephants come and sack the city. There probably won't even be a USA in 25 years. The best thing for you to do is figure out how to prepare for the inevitable.
Thanks to that hype known as Itanium, Alpha & PA-RISC went under.
No, it was because Intel bought out Alpha and killed it outright. It wasn't hype, it was a strategic decision by corporate executives. Same with PA-RISC; HP wanted to jump on the Itanic bandwagon with Intel (Itanic was co-developed by HP and Intel, it wasn't an Intel-only project), so they killed PA-RISC and put their engineers to work on Itanic.
Anyway, coming to Russia, if they want a processor not subject to any US laws, their choices are essentially ARM, which is quite inadequate for this applicaiton, or they could go w/ OpenRISC.
Why don't they just copy some other processor, like the Alpha or POWER chips? As long as they're not planning to sell them in the USA, and especially if they're mainly for internal use, they can just change their patent/copyright laws so that these designs are too old to be protected, and it'd be perfectly legal for them to base their designs on them. The USA did very well in its early days by totally ignoring British IP laws and making their own, more permissible laws.
This would be really sad, because other than the MS campus in Redmond, Washington State is a really beautiful and picturesque place with a great climate.
There were 2 stages in which Intel bought anything related to Alpha. First was when DEC dropped its lawsuit against Intel and sold StrongARM as well as all its fabs to Intel. The second was when Compaq decided to kill the Alpha, and sold all its IP to Intel. Actually, what really killed the Alpha, or any future for it was Compaq & Microsoft dropping support for NT on the platform.
You are right that HP co-developed Itanic - in fact, bulk of Itanic development was HP's, and it was just fabbed by Intel. Which is why it's not been difficult for Intel to underplay it, even though it's meant HP being the sole supplier of Itanic boxes - not much different commercially from PA-RISC. At least, PA-RISC had a much longer legacy of software going for it.
I think the Russians might be better off making an Alpha chip, which would give them a proven architecture, and they could put whatever proprietary OS they wanted on it. Or what they could do - try and buy all rights to the Alpha and OpenVMS from HP/Intel (which those 2 companies may not miss, since they are deprecated) and make a platform in Russia around them. Build their supercomputer around it, and maybe a few that they can sell to Europe, and then, maybe start a company that sells Alphastations within Russia, just like Yeelong (sp?) sells Loongson based Unixstations in China.
Russia manufactures SPARC compatible processors for some time now. One example MCST-R1000.
Russian copy of the US Space Shuttle .... built on German rocket technology .... built on principles in great part first outlined by Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
Don't forget about Goddard.
99.99% of "progress" is "stealing" ideas from each other and building on them.
"Good Artists Copy Great Artists Steal" -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas" -- Steve Jobs
True! And talking about Europe, which I forgot to discuss, they can base their efforts around LEON - the Open SPARC project of the CERN.
but it's infested. I think Russia should take up a collection to fund the ICBM to de-louse the place with a nice clean airburst. the plants will come back
Hard radiation is not good for plants or native animals. If you have to do such a thing, a human-specific plague would be much more ecological.
Better would be to find some way of conning the MS executives and managers to all take a trip to someplace remote and desolate, say, Death Valley, and for all the politicians in Washington to meet them there at the same time. Then, any WMD you want would be fine. While we're at it, maybe we could get anyone in East Texas who's sat on a jury for an IP/patent trial to go there as well, along with the Apple and GoDaddy execs.
The similarity is completely superficial (and you have to squint to even see the superficial similarities).