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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."
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.
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.
As an interesting observation, the Bitcoin network has peaked at over 60 exaFLOPS of computational power.
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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.