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."

Comments

Re:Industrial Espionage.

[lightknight]

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.

that's the same lies they used to say about USSR

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Industrial Espionage.

[JBMcB]

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.