Slashdot Mirror
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."
When the russians copied our b-29 superfortress to make the Tu-4, they made perfect copy. However, they also gained enough understanding that they based a whole line of aircraft on the tu-4.
The russians already tried to design an all-purpose CPU : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_2000
(the Elbrus Team and it's IP has been bought by Intel. Surprise...NOT.)
They used their captured German rocket engineers to develop their rocketry. That said, the US had their own German rocket engineers too, most notably Wernher von Braun, who led its rocket development up to the Saturn V.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2
according to the first paragraph .. it was the "first known human artifact to enter outer space" (with a citation too).
also for fun..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieseler_Fi_103R_(Reichenberg)
So the V2's did make it to space - not a full orbit.. and there was a version of the V1 designed to carry a person.. had they not been in the middle of a world war - and given a few years.. yea i bet they would have had bot down just fine..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Actually they had them train Russians by getting them to work on a dummy project with Russian assistants. Once the assistants had learnt all they could they were shifted onto the real work, and once enough assistants had been trained the German engineers vanished. That gave the Russian engineers a large enough skilled workforce.
It's amusing that your attempt to disparage the USSR and patrioticly beat your breast is a lot more complimentary than the very scary reality.