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Japan Aims To Win Exascale Race
dcblogs writes "In the global race to build the next generation of supercomputers — exascale — there is no guarantee the U.S. will finish first. But the stakes are high for the U.S. tech industry. Today, U.S. firms — Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Intel, in particular — dominate the global high performance computing (HPC) market. On the Top 500 list, the worldwide ranking of the most powerful supercomputers, HP now has 39% of the systems, IBM, 33%, and Cray, nearly 10%. That lopsided U.S. market share does not sit well with other countries, which are busy building their own chips, interconnects, and their own high-tech industries in the push for exascale. Europe and China are deep into effort to build exascale machines, and now so is Japan. Kimihiko Hirao, director of the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science of Japan, said Japan is prepping a system for 2020. Asked whether he sees the push to exascale as a race between nations, Hirao said yes. Will Japan try to win that race? 'I hope so,' he said. 'We are rather confident,' said Hirao, arguing that Japan has the technology and the people to achieve the goal. Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee and one of the academic leaders of the Top 500 supercomputing list, said Japan is serious and on target to deliver a system by 2020."
Down with the capitalist emperors!
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
setting a goal for 2018 or 2019 ?
Such races are very good for the overall development and progress of computing, as the new technologies that will be developed will eventually be used in desktops and mobile computing.
There are still challenges like the interconnects and the power draw, but IMHO these are problems that eventually will be solved.
This is nothing more than dick waving for nations.
Not news.
But thanks Japan and others for your participation.
...from becoming a hemispheric disaster..
Even the laughable freeze-the-ground-around-it plan seems to have been hatched to mollify Olympic commission voters who still gave Japan the 2020 games as the 'safe' choice over Istanbul and Madrid.
How does it compare to the total computing power of the combined Bitcoin miners?
The work to prevent Fukushima from being a "hemispheric disaster" already happened.
China is doing some amazing stuff in HPC, and with homegrown IP.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I think the exascale race will turn out to be a dead end. Tightly coupled calculations simply don't scale. To effectively use even current generation supercomputers you need to scale to thousands of cores, and there just aren't very many codes that can do that. Exascale computers will require scaling to millions of cores, and I don't see that happening. For all but a handful of (mostly contrived) problems, that won't be possible.
So like it or not, we need to settle for loosely coupled codes that run mostly independent calculations on lots of nodes with only limited communication between them. And for that, you don't need these specially designed systems with super expensive interconnects. Any ordinary data center works just as well for a fraction of the cost.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
year-round heating will be free in japan ssstarting in 2018! lizard people, rejoisss!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The hemispheric disaster has not happened yet. But until they finish unloading reactor 4 - which won't be until end of 2014, any serious earthquake (a high probability in that area) could cause the precarious elevated rod bundles to crash down and even the best case scenarios, if that happens, are ugly.
How bad things are after that is still up for debate, but reactor 4 is a clear and present danger.
Makes me wonder how much processing power AWS has, if one could use it all at once.
Where is that 'rest of the world' anyway?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I was not aware that Fujitsu (hint, RIKEN's K Computer is from Fujitsu, powered by Fujitsu's SPARC designs, and Fujitsu's interconnect) is an American company. Thanks for the head's up.
Japan surely is able to build those systems from scratch.
Surely, what with race being 'a social construct', and us all being 'the same', one of the MANY countries in Africa, full of people 'just like us', should be able to win this?
LOL...
As an interesting observation, the Bitcoin network has peaked at over 60 exaFLOPS of computational power.
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This all happened in Japan in the late 1970s and ended up in a Government Ministry endorsed 5Th Generation Supercomputer Project in the early 1980s.
I remember this well.
Here is a write-up at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer
Yes, 1982. Now thirty years ago! Then, Japan (Government and Nation) was rolling high numbers and looked to "Break The Bank" in the US.
But the Financial and Land Price Speculation Bubble ... busted in 1989. Leveraged finances bubble busted in 1997. All hope was lost then. Fukushima, a sad tale on the coat tails of the others mentioned and has yet to play out to its end.
No. The assessment by the University of Tennessee (UT) Professor is patently wrong by facts of history and simple logic; both in apparent short supply at UT.
QED
But until they finish unloading reactor 4 - which won't be until end of 2014, any serious earthquake (a high probability in that area) could cause the precarious elevated rod bundles to crash down and even the best case scenarios, if that happens, are ugly.
Uh huh. You do realize that these fuel rods have already experienced a magnitude 9 earthquake and the "crash down" didn't happen? The "precarious elevation" is not that precarious.
compare measured temperature to models and find...that the models fail
so latest word (and these guys are big inthe climate community) is that models are in fact fictitious...contra data recently in PNAS claiming that missing temp data from poles allows models ot agree....stay tuned
point is, the science is not settled just cause a bunch of peple agree; you may not know this, but from about 1900 to 1950, there was a consensus that CO2 human global forcing couldn't occur cause the atmosphere was already saturated for absorbance in the IR band..a consensus, I say
turned out to be wrong cause they forgot that it is the optically thin outer layer that is crucial...stayu tuned, but don't be so effin arrogant
Building an exascale computer is all well and good, but we still have to find a way to power the damn thing. How will we generate the necessary 1.21 jiggawatts?
Computers are ESD sensitive, after all, so lightning is right out. Perhaps a stainless steel frame would help with the flux dispersal...
You forget the Earth Simulator, based on NECs SX-6 processor architecture and the fastest super computer in the world from 2002 to 2004.
True, but that's long been decomissioned. The K computer (current #4) was the #1 for a while and the first to beat 10PFlops. It uses home-grown SPARC chips.
While the original SPARC wasn't a Japanese invention at this point, it's just an instruction set that they have a lot of experience with since Fujitsu supplied all the highest performing SPARCs to Sun.
They were fabbed by Fujitus and used Fujitsu's own homegrown interconnect and with that reached an almost unprecedented efficiency.
SJW n. One who posts facts.