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."
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
It's not a lack of free-thinking that the Chinese are experiencing; it's merely a strategy.
The Chinese are playing catch up to Japan / America / Europe / possibly Russia. At this point in the game, it costs less to copy everyone, than to innovate. Once they've caught up, they'll switch to innovating, as copying will not pay as well in comparison. The same thing has happened before with the United States, Britain, etc.
I am John Hurt.
Patent filing has nothing to do with legitimate abilities.
This is a symptom of the flawed patent system in America. It has lead to a lack of competition. Now instead of many companies driving technological innovation, there are a small number of big companies and patent trolls intent on holding it up for ransom. So far the resistance to the same sort of patent death spiral in Europe gives them a chance to make this attempt they are making work. But if the megacorp's and patent troll's political bribes (sorry I meant to say lobbying) work over there, they will be screwed too. So here's to Europe, may she reign supreme in technology. Too bad the ship seems to be sinking over here.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
What did they copy to make the first space satellite? First man in space? Hmmmm...
"Our"?
Unless you own Boeing stock, the correct word is "their".
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.
It's already someone else. Intel, etc aren't American. They are a multinational. They barely pay American taxes. Most of their employees are in other countries.
This is all a farce.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Well the Chinese only have another 50 years to catch up, the Russians another 20 or so. Murdering your free thinkers, has a tendency of driving you back into the dark ages. Especially in the name of "progress".
Om, nomnomnom...
Russia doesn't have the silicon crystal production facilities
If Russia decides some products, like silicon wafers for example, are strategically important and American or other external producers can not be trusted (for security, military or simply business reasons), price becomes a secondary consideration and economies of scale will not matter. Russia can afford to buy the most up to date tools, or they can build their own (maybe not as cheap as others, but that, as I said, wouldn't matter). And I think the Russian leadership still has the courage and political capability to start and finance long term strategic research and development programs, which, unfortunately, the USA leadership seems to have lost lately.
I have an acquaintance who went over to China and worked with their manufacturing sector for several years. He loved the country, thought the people and culture were very nice, but was not impressed *at all* with their engineering prowess.
The problem isn't that the people are incapable of innovating. The problem is they have no culture or institutions to support innovation. They are trying desperately to change this, but China is run as an enormous top-down bureaucracy. Change isn't going to happen even at a modest pace.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
They said exactly the same thing about the Japanese, 40-50years ago.
Even when Japan started making superior products at lower prices.
Then Japan took over most high-end manufacturing for a while.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
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).
Fuck the world. The more we do to please the world, the further behind we fall. I don't care that a quart of milk causes your granny to have apoplexy when she tries to convert it. Just fuck the world. We don't WANT to be like you - half the world is beating a path to our front door (back door in the case of Mexicans) because they want to be like us!
Besides which, your metrics are no less arbitrary than the length of a king's foot, or the first joint of his thumb, or any other damned unit we use.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
They have the capability to finance every kind of shit. They just don't have the other, crucial capability - to have the shit actually done. There's no problem with money, it's just that it's either wasted completely or ends up in the pockets of some selected friends of gov't beaurocrats.
Some people have very short memories. In fact, there is a quote for them: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Sir Winston Churchill
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Well, the difference between then and now is pure xenophobia versus some xenophobia mixed in with some real observations.
History is not inevitable. It may have even been true that the Japanese did ape American and European designs, but what will differentiate the Japanese design renaissance and a Chinese one is that Japan wasn't under the control of an autocratic government like China is, nor is their history full of autocrats and strict living.
Some? sure, and it's enough for us in the west to see it as restrictive.
A lot? not enough to stifle innovation and progress. Nissan's able to make a AWD car that is faster around the Nurburgring than Porsche's flagship model that costs twice as much. Sony, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, Yamaha, et al are doing similar work. In Korea? LG, Samsung and so forth are also in the same boat.
Will a Chinese firm do the same? Only time will tell; but I'm willing to bet no. And only 10 bucks because it's possible I could be very wrong.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.