Slashdot Mirror
China Building a 100-petaflop Supercomputer Using Domestic Processors
concealment writes "As the U.S. launched what's expected to be the world's fastest supercomputer at 20 petaflops, China is building a machine that is intended to be five times faster when it is deployed in 2015. China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer will run at 100 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), according to the Guangzhou Supercomputing Center, where the machine will be housed. Tianhe-2 could help keep China competitive with the future supercomputers of other countries, as industry experts estimate machines will start reaching 1,000-petaflop performance by 2018."
And, naturally, it's planned to use a domestically developed MIPS processor
Copying the instruction set is not the same as copying the processor.
Keep telling yourself that. I am sure you will sleep better at night...
Because that's all America does anymore.
A domestically developed MIPS processor?
I wonder how much of that "domestic development" was looking at what foreign companies were making in their country and surrounding areas?
Has anybody even been working on a MIPS processor that they could outsource, for anything larger than little router boxes and things, since DEC died a horrible death ages ago?
You're right, but it looks like they've done the latter. http://laotsao.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/sw1600-and-alpha-21164/
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Honestly, given the nature of Chinese copying, plus the kind of overstated and shoddy output we've historically seen from State-Capitalist projects from Soviet governments, I think that the burden is more on the Chinese to make this boast a reality.
Building massive, highly functional supercomputers is not child's play, regardless of your beowulf clusters of hot grits down Natalie Portman's pants experience. It's one thing to cluster a few computers together and to have very specific programs that do very specific kinds of jobs, it's another matter entirely to have hundreds or thousands of microprocessors working in tandem and to be able to simply even allocate their tasks, let alone program for them. There's a reason why every city government has their own supercomputer, they're difficult.
The Chinese government has the resources to build such a computer, but only if they work against corruption and don't delude themselves when they have difficulties in an effort for every middle manager to safe face.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Chinese technology has already gone much farther than you give them credit, and the natural tendency is for them to surpass stagnated US sooner or later. Considering how US has put in place so many impediments to innovation with the excuse of "helping innovation" that is just a matter of time.
And please, although the Chinese government is very corrupt, it is not more corrupt than US government or US corporations.
You're right, but it looks like they've done the latter. http://laotsao.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/sw1600-and-alpha-21164/
It says right in the ShenWei Wikipedia article that it's based on the DEC Alpha but something that strikes me as curious is that your article refers to a chip that lasted from 1995 to 1998. So I am to believe that by outright copying a fifteen year old chip from a processor line that has been extinct for a decade or more has yielded a modern day competitive multiprocessing chip?
You can convince me they copied DEC's work. You can convince me they violated IP laws. You can convince me that it is their societal norm to ignore restrictive IP laws. Hell, I'll tell you that right now. But to say that they are doing no work to build on top of these chips feels like it must be erroneous unless what we see is 1990s technology in the ShenWei processors.
This isn't a black and white scenario here. Yes, it's bad that IP laws have been violated. Yes, it's bad that DEC won't see a dime from any of their work being used. But it is also a good thing to have a competitive architecture arise in the world of computing and also it feels good to have a race with other countries for computing power. I can only hope our super computing budget is considered part of the onerous "defense budget" and our leaders who are concerned with a dick measuring contest can dump tons of money into supercomputers for modeling and simulation to scientists while at the same time being able to give the hallowed talking point of "I increased defense spending."
You can start with someone else's good idea, turn it into a great idea and share some credit, right?
My work here is dung.
I seriously like people who whistle in the dark to overcome their angst.
It took a long time for evolution to put a person together. A machine will get to our level a bit faster. My phone does face recognition and tracking in an instant. That still amazes and worries me.
If we can accurately model an ant's brain, down to the individual neuron, in the next 100 years or so, I'll be impressed.
If you can do that without violating any patents, EVERYONE would be impressed.
Are you confusing them for a country that hasn't already stuck a machine right at the top of the top500 list?
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
You know a handful of British guys with a BBC Micro designed and taped out the ARM, right? That was 25 years ago, before FPGAs. I don't know why anyone thinks China in 2012 can't put together enough math & EE knowledge to prototype and tape out a microprocessor. Half the people on Slashdot could do it if they had state funding and limitless time. You could probably do it yourself, using Wikipedia to research architecture, and Xilinx WebPack to program the FPGAs. Start with an first-generation 32-bit RISC chip and go from there. Microprocessor design is not rocket science, it's just coding. The probability is, for every American smart enough to be a chip designer at Intel, there are four Chinese guys who are equally smart. Although three of them probably work at Intel already ...
There's no reason why the West shouldn't accept China as an equal. They're rational, hardworking, and contribute to modern life. They can be our friends.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the UK became worried and self-concious about the rise of Germany. Soon enough, they were diplomatic enemies, and then the war started. And yet, after the war - and its followup - the UK found out that life didn't end when Germany was as strong or stronger than them.
This is the beginning of the 21st century, and the US is worried and self-concious about the rise of China. Let's please not fuck things up like we did last time.
And please, although the Chinese government is very corrupt, it is not more corrupt than US government or US corporations.
It's very fashionable to overstate the problems of the US. Even with all it's problems it remains one of the most successful systems in the world on any number of levels.
That said, the rampant corruption on China isn't the kind that will interfere with things like building a supercomputer. Quite the opposite in fact. Need a neighborhood demolished or workers expropriated? No problem.
Where as the much smaller level of corruption in the US is almost precisely targeted to screw these kinds of projects. Congressman can't tack on some random spending for their district? Screw over the whole project just to build a reputation so everyone bends over next time.
the natural tendency is for them to surpass stagnated US sooner or later
Probably later. Its common for Chinese fanbois to paint the US as some stagnant, bloated, lethargic country, and in some ways it is, but not in technology. The US still leads the world in technical innovation, and China is still playing catchup, and will for some time. Militarily China is 20 years behind in submarine technology, has one aircraft carrier (Russian surplus), is just now introducing stealth technology in its aircraft, and still sends most of its elite students to US schools for hi-tech education. Oh, and lets not forget the army of hackers the Chinese government STILL employs to spy on American hi-tech corporations right now.
NATURAL tendancy? How is that? 100 years ago China was nation of drug addicts beholden to the British Empire. Natural tendancy my ass. The US is mired in debt and a stuck bureaucracy right now, but to count it out is a bit premature.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
No, your phone does edge detection to get a series of numbers. There's a HUGE difference between that and actual intelligence.
I can program a computer in seconds to do maths that's beyond any human's capability to work out in their lifetime. That's not intelligence.
Now if you could say on each image that "this is me", "this isn't me", and it could build up a database of people that should and should not be authorised and OVER TIME learn on it's own without just having a bunch of statistics like "> 20% green = > 90% probability", then you'd have some mild form of intelligence. Otherwise you just have heuristics, which are 0.000001% of how actual intelligence operates.
What you're describing is a black box that gets an answer right in one scenario when fed with ALL available data. I have no data regarding what my father looks like if he dressed up in drag and shaved his head and I looked at him from the back - but I'd stand a pretty damn good chance of recognising him if he did that and my brain got that fresh, never-before-seen data.
Computers currently only form patterns that you inform them could exist in the data (in some way). They never form patterns of their own, but even pigeons are capable of that. Feed a pigeon at certain times of the day and it associates *SOMETHING* that happens at that time of day with feeding. Literally, it gets "superstitious" and does things like bang its head on a wall because that happened to coincide with feeding last time. It posits a theory, tests it repeatedly, takes that new data into account, and changes the theory as necessary. And that's a pigeon.
Computers, currently, do NOT do this, unless informed to do this, which is another matter entirely. Humans are not numbers-crunchers and computers are not hard-wired biological circuits joined by physical processes dependent on billions of interactions that change every second. Although either one can simulate the other, to some degree, it's difficult, long-winded, and like trying to play Half Life 3 on a Turing machine.
Devo?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The point was technology (my phone) hasn't been in development for over a billion years. Tommy Flowers only put Colossus together in the 1930s. All you've said is true given less than 100 years of effort. I impressed that a tiny tiny phone does "edge detection". I stopped reading after, I can't help if you're not happy.
But the neuronal connections (10,000 per neuron, constantly changing) and time-slices that you'd need to get even close to simulating the number of interactions in an ant's brain when it smells a certain scent-trail? You might JUST about be able to approach that complexity if you turned the whole Earth into a computer with the nanoscale technology.
I'm sorry, but I'm not buying that. Are you suggesting that the difference of the density of features between brain tissue and anything that we can reasonably manufacture is on the scale of 10^10? (6*10^24 kg for Earth and 10^-6 kg for an ant brain, with negligible difference in density between the two, so 30 orders of magnitude of difference in volume) This is ridiculous, that would mean that we would have to simulate a single neuron (20 um?) using a 100km-sized device. That seems really ridiculous, no matter how complex a single neuron's interaction with the environment is.
Ezekiel 23:20
You are way off. 1st off the neuro nets in use today doing amazing things are based off a really really simplistic abstracted concept of how neurons work. You don't have to simulate the whole thing, you can crudely approximate it and get world changing results and we've already done this using a concept from the 1940s. With advances in our knowledge we can make the approximation more accurate without simulating all the details--- in fact, I worked with a guy for a short bit who was working on a mainframe that was simulating 100s of neurons down to the ion flow and chemistry and they were not doing it thinking we'll buy a bigger computer someday, they were doing it to discover more which would be used in an abstraction that didn't require all the complexity of the physical world and millions of years of attempts to find - it is much better for a digital machine to do digital work not to simulate analog which is what you are thinking of. We don't simulate analog on computers; we convert analog into digital then use digital techniques to simulate the analog - usually highly abstracted as well -- because an approximate result is enough (it is analog, there is no exact result you can only ever hope to approximate it.) Given the rate of high-resolution analog simulation of brains going on now it wouldn't take a planet sized computer to do it but it is out of practical reach for now.
They'll simulate a human brain scan SOON. it won't do much for quite a while afterwards - once it does anything meaningful we'll read the press release. The first ones will be simple neurons networked to model the brain scan; something that is probably possible today if somebody would fund it. Brain imagining should be far enough, like probably in the last few years. I don't think a cloned brain network will work because that network is heavily influenced by external factors (like behavior at operating temp) which is why people are trying to improve the abstract model and simplify it... it could be the 1st ones are still dead simple but they know how to adjust the scanned brain's network to compensate. Me, I think many of those difficult problems will be solved by AI powered tools. We you do get something that begins to approximate a mind I think the scifi people will be wrong, the machines will be erratic and insane. It'll take a long time before they are functional (even then likely by self-training simulations which would still produce insane AIs that are not predictable.) If you mess with AI programming a bit you'll get what I'm talking about. Realistically, the practical AI is what the effort is put into-- the people who think of AI as Applied Intelligence because that is mostly what is going on - we can grasp and understand narrow niches like spam filtering, plus it produces useful stuff now - the old AI stuff likely will never grasp it all, or if they do they can't know they actually achieved it. Not that such research is not beneficial long term.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It indeed remains the most successful system in the world, but it is less successful than it used to be, and if US doesn't make a U-Turn soon it will keep getting less and less successful as time goes until it fades, as all empires.