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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 precisely the type of dick waving we should have between nations. It is pretty much harmless, unlike war, and at the end of the day everyone, not just the one nation that "wins", will benefit from the technology that comes out of it.
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.
Everyone wins, except for the tax payers.
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.
This is nothing more than dick waving for nations.
Except that this is the fifth generation of Japanese computer dick waving.
Ezekiel 23:20
Even the tax pays win in the sense it's probably way cheaper than transcontenintal warfare.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Where is that 'rest of the world' anyway?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
You DO realize that a lot of the technology that the public currently uses is derived from academic and government research that was funded by tax dollars, right? Heck, even military research has resulted in spread-spectrum communications for cell phones. So the tax payers have benefited from the use of their tax dollars for this. A claim to the contrary is both misinformed about the past and short-sighted about the future.
Japan surely is able to build those systems from scratch.
Farily small. 60663.20 Peta FLOPS (60 exaflops) at my time of clicking if those numbers can be trusted (likely since the network hashrate can be derived from the average speed of blocks being found) Not that bitcoin mining uses floating point units since it is brute forcing a hash... but I digress.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
As an interesting observation, the Bitcoin network has peaked at over 60 exaFLOPS of computational power.
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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.
Everyone wins, except for the tax payers.
Do you anti-tax types ever think about anything else? Money is not the point of all of this.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
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.