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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."
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. "
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 have these abilities, and will be able to develop their own ideas where the Chinese can only copy.
Like they "innovated" during the Communist Era?
VAX: When you care enough to steal the very best.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
China has a tremendous skill-set that while works very well for reverse engineering and building things, does not work so well where free-thinking innovation are needed to make advances.
It's a big mistake to underestimate their abilities... Just 3 days ago we read that China surpassed the USA as top patent filer.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
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.)
Patent filing has nothing to do with legitimate abilities.
What did they copy to make the first space satellite? First man in space? Hmmmm...
Reminds me of my favorite generic speech template:
"I wish to speak to you all on the important subject of _____. As you all know, much has been done in this area, but there are still a great many things left to do. But knowing this is not enough, it will take real effort and dedication. What we need now is progress. I need progress, I request progress, I demand progress! I am certain, though, that with focus and teamwork, we can continue to make the changes that will allow for a better future. Thank you all for your time."
I am officially gone from
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.
Nazi Germany's V-2, so did the U.S.
@de_machina
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.
"Our"?
Unless you own Boeing stock, the correct word is "their".
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.
Such irony—the Russians invented the art of reverse-engineering American chips. Observe!
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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...
I lived there for a while, went to Uni there, am married to a Chinese person and have many Chinese friends, both here and in China. I'm very comfortable saying that Chinese people do not innovate very well. In general, creativity and innovation are not traits that are encouraged in Chinese society. The culture encourages conformity and the like. In school, they study very, VERY hard but it's route memorization not creativity. They are much better at copying others' ideas than coming up with their own. That's not US marketing speaking, that's my own observations.
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.
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.
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.'
Because they weren't competent enough. The East Germans were, though.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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).
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.
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.
But the Tu-4 weighed more than the B-29, they couldn't build the tires and had to buy them on the US Military Surplus market post-war.
Due to limitations on resources rather than limitations on engineering expertise.
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
Wow. No more cappuccino for you, man.
No cappuccino, thank you. I take my caffeine American style, drip brewed with Folger's coffee. And, since the subject is units of measurement, why does Mr. Coffee think that a cup is only six ounces? WTF? I brew twelve cups of java, drink 4 (12 oz) cups, and the coffee is down to those nasty looking dregs. Seems to me that a 12 cup coffee pot should hold just about 96 ounces, which should mean that I get 6 of my (12 oz) cups of coffee, before there are nasty solids visible in the bottom.
It's probably a freaking FRENCH conspiracy!
"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.
Talking about leading edge computing...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#November_2011
Top ten are all running Linux...
Trolling is a art!
Stupid rednecks are very innovative people! You should see the things they can do with beer cans alone.
In all seriousness, even if Chinese culture/education doesn't promote creativity or thinking outside of the box, with 1.3 billion people there are bound to be enough 'innovative' engineers for the Chinese to compete with whomever they choose.
I wish to speak to you all on the important subject of mod-points. As you all know, much has been done in this area, but there are still a great many things left to do. But knowing this is not enough, it will take real effort and dedication. What we need now is progress. I need progress, I request progress, I demand progress! I am certain, though, that with focus and teamwork, we can continue to make the changes that will allow for a better future. Thank you all for your time.
You can't handle the truth.
The impression i have gotten of Japanese corporate life is that it is a modernized bushido.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Learning from the Nazis isn't enough... http://xkcd.com/984/
I'll just pick one example of Werner von Braun's influence (and superiority) on launch vehicle design. von Braun's team in Huntsville produced the vehicle (Jupiter C) which launched the first American satellite. The Jupiter C was a derivative of the Redstone IRBM developed by the von Braun team in the US which was itself a direct descendant of the V2. von Braun's team launched the Jupiter C in less than two months days after they were authorized to do so after the failure of the first Vanguard satellite (developed by the US Naval Research Laboratories) launch attempt in Dec 1957. In 1956 von Braun's team had launched a similar vehicle to the Jupiter C to within 7/8ths of orbital velocity and could have shortly gone to orbit thus beating Sputnik 1 by a year but the Eisenhower administration prohibited them from doing so. By the way, it was a Redstone (derivative of the V2) which launched the first two Mercury missions.
I have to say I don't feel too sorry for the rest of the world if they're getting screwed over by MS and Adobe. While designing CPUs competitive with the latest x86-64 designs from Intel and AMD is not a trivial task, and building a fab capable of mass-producing such CPUs is even more daunting (though you could get TSMC to build something close, although I don't think they have quite the process technology Intel has), these other two only make software. We already have totally free open-source software to replace MS's OSes, and there's a lot of free open-source software to replace much of what Adobe makes (namely their PDF software, their vector-graphics software (Inkscape), and their photo alteration software (though it has a crappy name)). No, Linux isn't fully Windows-compatible; I never said it was a drop-in replacement, but freedom isn't always convenient. If you want convenience, cough up the $$$ to MS; if you want freedom, it's available to you, though there might be some trouble if you're trying to run Windows-only software of some kind.
If foreign powers don't like these big American companies holding them over a barrel, then they need to put more effort into making already-existing alternatives more viable, such as by funding open-source development. Sitting around and whining about American power isn't going to get you anywhere; if you don't like the current situation, get off your ass and do something about it. Russia for one is full of talented programmers; maybe they should put some of them to work developing open-source software to replace proprietary stuff made by American companies, and put them out of business.