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China Builds World's Fastest Supercomputer Without U.S. Chips (computerworld.com)

Reader dcblogs writes: China on Monday revealed its latest supercomputer, a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. This follows a U.S. government decision last year to deny China access to Intel's fastest microprocessors. There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China's new system, the Sunway TaihuLight. Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops (Linpack is 93 petaflops), according to the latest biannual release today of the world's Top500 supercomputers. It has been long known that China was developing a 100-plus petaflop system, and it was believed that China would turn to U.S. chip technology to reach this performance level. But just over a year ago, in a surprising move, the U.S. banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China's top supercomputing research centers. The U.S. initiated this ban because China, it claimed, was using its Tianhe-2 system for nuclear explosive testing activities. The U.S. stopped live nuclear testing in 1992 and now relies on computer simulations. Critics in China suspected the U.S. was acting to slow that nation's supercomputing development efforts. There has been nothing secretive about China's intentions. Researchers and analysts have been warning all along that U.S. exascale (an exascale is 1,000 petaflops) development, supercomputing's next big milestone, was lagging.

247 comments

  1. First by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Help, in trapped in a fortune cookie factory!
    Lucky numbers: 3, 12, 26, 33, 50, 58

  2. consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This happens when you don't allow export of your chips to someone who has the knowledge to design their own chips.
    It gives them the incentive to accelerate development and deployment of their homegrown designs.

    Not only do you lose a business opportunity, you're also in danger of losing your technology leadership.

    1. Re:consequences... by rahvin112 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Using western licensed IP of course. These chips are based on MIPS.

    2. Re:consequences... by bigpat · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This happens when you don't allow export of your chips to someone who has the knowledge to design their own chips.
      It gives them the incentive to accelerate development and deployment of their homegrown designs.

      Not only do you lose a business opportunity, you're also in danger of losing your technology leadership.

      Yes, penny wise, but pound foolish decision. China would never do the same to us because they want us to be dependent on their production.

      It is pretty idiotic that our foreign policy and military establishment seem intent on picking periodic fights with China over stupid little things rather than trying to elevate the relationship to become close allies. China and US economies are closely tied. We literally would not have Christmas without China. Much of our equipment is made in China. And for China they have the US to thank for much of their growth over the past 40 years.

      And they have a military that could hurt us quite a bit once they turn off our satellites and other technology. Or worse, use our technology against us after they infiltrate it.

      Despite fighting a proxy war with China in Korea sixty years ago, we don't have the kind of bad blood that especially poisons their relations with Japan, Vietnam or even Korea.

      For the sake of US prosperity and world peace it would be best to find the compromises that can keep us on good terms and get us to better relations and not push us further apart.

      As for Chinese human rights... well we are allies with Saudi Arabia which has the worst human rights record on the planet. And we are far less (indirectly) dependent on Saudi oil than we used to be.

    3. Re: consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      so you would just give them the south china sea uncontested in violation of all international laws and treaties?

      forgot tibet already?' tiannamen square ring a bell?

      no? ok lets just be friends yay!

    4. Re:consequences... by MightyMartian · · Score: 1, Insightful

      It always strikes me as a great irony that much of China's technical progress has been based on other peoples' work. The Soviets gave the Chinese nuclear technology before the big falling out, and much of China's technological advancement over the last four decades has been via Western technology, either legally obtained or via out and out theft.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    5. Re:consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Decades of handing over all our tech so they can make it cheaper, and now they're making it cheaper without us? What'cha gonna do about it? You going to go over there and sue their government in their own courts? Good luck with that.

    6. Re:consequences... by kriston · · Score: 2

      That's not the architecture in these chips. You're referring to the older Loongson which was a licensed from a MIPS clone designer who had questionable patent situation concerning several patented CPU instructions. These instructions magically appeared in later Loongsons, but that's not the point of this article.

      The CPUs in this article are reported to be very similar to DEC Alpha 21164, and it has been reported that no such intellectual property license exists.

      --

      Kriston

    7. Re:consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      That's been the story of technology in every country ever... Where's the irony?

    8. Re:consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      OK, Alanis.

    9. Re:consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This happens when you don't allow export of your chips to someone who has the knowledge to design their own chips.
      It gives them the incentive to accelerate development and deployment of their homegrown designs.

      Not only do you lose a business opportunity, you're also in danger of losing your technology leadership.

      Who says that they can't / couldn't do both?

    10. Re:consequences... by tomhath · · Score: 0

      But they didn't design their own chips, they stole a 30 year old design and brute forced it into a bigger cluster.

      The US could easily build a computer with a larger performance rating using an existing but more modern design if there was a good reason to do so. Instead a completely new design will be used.

    11. Re:consequences... by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      The USA has cognitive dissonance with China:

      i.e. We want your (cheap foreign) goods but you can't have our top (computer) chips ...

      Thankfully the economies are tied so it is everyone best's interest to keep both healthy.

    12. Re: consequences... by jovius · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Every techonological advancement is based on 'other people's' work. That's the very nature of scientific research. Open communication, peer reviewing and co-development are hindered or led astray by nationalistic political interests, which are _the obstacles_ to overcome.

    13. Re: consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Woopdey doo???
      So much worse than US? Are you kidding, Check out your prisons first. Your drug wars.

    14. Re:consequences... by bigpat · · Score: 1

      The USA has cognitive dissonance with China:

      i.e. We want your (cheap foreign) goods but you can't have our top (computer) chips ...

      Thankfully the economies are tied so it is everyone best's interest to keep both healthy.

      In the current South China sea dispute we seem to be antagonizing China without offering a potential compromise. I think if China and the other parties got to keep some of the islands and basically divvied up the economic exclusion zones while creating open freely accessible waterways for shipping under international treaty that would be the essence of a compromise that could be mutually beneficial for commerce, fishing and even oil and gas exploration. Instead we are being annoying with "protests" and sending ships through without even helping the other countries solidify their competing claims by building lighthouses or whatever... It is like we are taunting China without any reasonable objective or strategy that could lead to a resolution. That is dangerous.

      "Best interest" could go out the window if anyone gets killed in an incident.

    15. Re:consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Are you aware that very very much of your technical progress has been based on other peoples' work, namely Indian, European, Russian and Chinese immigrants? Are you also aware that everything you have done for 50+ years have been based on previous research, based on previous research, based on previous research, always involving foreign scientists? It strikes me as a great irony that most Americans don't realize this when talking about how they "made everything".

      You seem to think that the ability to come up with something, figure something out, or innovate, or make, is reserved for people who can call themselves American, and that you have superior morals and ethics compared to the rest of the world, and that "they" - whoever is on the current agenda - are nothing but dishonest thieves. You're naive, paranoid, hateful, and wrong on so many levels.

    16. Re:consequences... by HiThere · · Score: 1

      I think there term you're looking for is "inspired by".

      It's not clear to me that a similarity of instructions is sufficient to require a license. Now if you were claiming that the implementation of the instructions were similar, that might be a valid point.

      Even so, I'd be dubious. DEC hasn't been around for over a decade, so a new high-end processor isn't likely to have used it's techniques. The Alpha 21164 was released around 1995, that's about 20 years ago. I doubt that there are valid patents or copyrights, and you clearly aren't asserting trademark violation. Even if there were copyrights, they would need to be considered "abandonware", though I'm not sure that is actually a legal term.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    17. Re:consequences... by whodunit · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It is pretty idiotic that our foreign policy and military establishment seem intent on picking periodic fights with China over stupid little things rather than trying to elevate the relationship to become close allies.

      Have you been living under a rock for the last several years? The Chinese have been using dredgers to build artificial islands atop coral reefs in the South China Sea, and these islands are now equipped with huge runways for operating military craft from fighters to patrol aircraft to medium bombers; all so they can project firepower over the entire South China Sea. To simply claim the entire Sea right up to the coasts of their regional neighbors as their own is one thing, but China has invested in a massive military build-up to back up their claims with raw force. Many of those nations are our regional allies, especially the Philippines. And if that's not enough, the Chinese have long engaged in hostile cybercrimes against the United States, not only hacking critical military defense information (like the information on the F-35 they stole) but also an ongoing government-ran campaign to steal American commercial trade secrets that mirrors their complete and utter disdain for Western Intellectual Property rights.

      And you're going to tell me that America is the one "picking fights" because we dared sail a ship too close to a few of their sand-castles? Freedom of Navigation exercises are run frequently, all over the globe, and are NOT mutually exclusive with traditional diplomacy.

      I understand that some people are deeply suspicious or even disdainful of America's role in world politics; but when you try to make out the 800 pound gorilla of Asia - who's busy mugging everyone it can get its hairy paws on - as the poor victim here, you just come across as a moron.

    18. Re:consequences... by bigpat · · Score: 1

      I am not saying China is a victim... where do you get that? I am critical of America's use of symbolic military power while failing to address the issues of the South China sea constructively.

      China has certainly been pushing the South China sea issue. But they need the resources and the other countries have done similar things to lock in their claims. The issue to me is that the US should be helping the other countries solidify their claims instead of just doing drive bys. In some way that would be more aggressive, but at the same time as building infrastructure on those reefs the US should be trying to find a compromise.

      As it is now, the US and the regional players are showing little interest in countering the moves on the ground except in a symbolic sense or too late. Military patrols are all well and good, but that is not a solution. For a few million dollars we could have been helping the Phillipines construct and man lighthouses on their reefs, but now we see the Chinese island hopping while we are busy posturing.

      As for the cyber war with the US... the espionage was probably a two way street. What is needed there is a closer relationship to agree on how to make it stop. Not more whining about it. And yes, China, the cyber spying is annoying... please stop.

    19. Re:consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Knights Landing were probably a special case. The US legislators probably saw what the US government is using to model the nuclear stock pile in the future and read a report emphasizing the significance of the amount of memory capacity per multicore node to the nuclear weapons modelling and freaked out of the thought that the Chinese would get the same technology as a part of a routine system upgrade. It's still stupid, backward thinking decision, but likely a beneficial one to the global technology market on the whole, assuming the Chinese are willing to productize, package and spread the benefits of their innovations.

    20. Re:consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I understand that the China is simply doing exactly the same thing that the USA is doing and done previously.

    21. Re:consequences... by whodunit · · Score: 3, Informative

      I see you didn't click any of the links. For starters, the this one clearly explains that these "drive-bys" are not, in any way, shape or form, mutually exclusive with traditional diplomacy. They're a tool for enhancing traditional diplomacy. This link explains the legal nuances of the freedom of navigation operation in much greater detail, and describes the legal and diplomatic needle the operation was threading. Sailing a single destroyer past an island is hardly a flexing of military muscle. Flexing muscle is when you sail an aircraft carrier battle group through the strait of Taiwan. As for the hacking, please note the lede paragraph of this story:

      Chinese state-backed hackers have carried out a string of cyber espionage attacks on U.S. companies, violating a pact signed by the two countries to stop carrying out this kind of activity, according to a cybersecurity company.

      The two-way street you suggest has already been attempted, and it has sadly resulted in jack diddly. Attempts to bridge these gaps by inviting China to participate in the major US-and-allies annual pacific naval exercises were similarly undermined by the Chinese sending an uninvited spy ship.

      You see, there is no lack of diplomatic effort being made regarding American-Chinese relations - but time and again the Chinese have declined to reign in their aggressive efforts to enrich themselves at the cost of others. It is only natural that the United States has been taking measures to re-assert their commitments; (diplomatic, economic, and defense-wise) to their many regional allies in the face of ever-more-bold Chinese demonstrations of military power and diplomatic hardball.

    22. Re:consequences... by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      Yes, totally agree! The USA is poking a sleeping giant.

      This short-sightedness is going to come back and bite us in the ass. You know, I know it, but sadly it seems the politicians don't have a clue.

      America became great because it _helped_ other counties. We should be setting a _positive_ example for other countries, not fucking them over every chance we get.

    23. Re:consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Yes, we know you are illegally claiming ALL of the south china sea, in violation of international law, but instead of disputing your claim in its entirety, we'd like to recognize -half- of your illegitimate claim on the condition that you stop trying to expand into your smaller neighbors."

      Because appeasement worked so well with Germany.

      Captcha: Inexact.

    24. Re: consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually that all sounds like pretty pathetic diplomacy.

      Next we will be boycotting their Olympics.

    25. Re:consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      but time and again the Chinese have declined to reign in their aggressive efforts to enrich themselves at the cost of others

      I heard the Chinese are willing to talk as soon as the Americans un-enrich themselves of The State of Hawaii.

    26. Re:consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's not the architecture in these chips. You're referring to the older Loongson which was a licensed from a MIPS clone designer who had questionable patent situation concerning several patented CPU instructions. These instructions magically appeared in later Loongsons, but that's not the point of this article.

      The CPUs in this article are reported to be very similar to DEC Alpha 21164, and it has been reported that no such intellectual property license exists.

      No such license is needed. The Alpha 21164 was released in 1995 so any patents on it expired at the latest in 2015.

    27. Re:consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's what "progress" means. You expect China to reinvent all of technology from scratch?

      That's not what any previous tech leader has done, America included - it imported its expertise from Britain (in the 19th century) and the rest of Europe (in the 20th).

    28. Re:consequences... by mikeiver1 · · Score: 1

      Not impressed at all. Any group of IP thief's can throw a shit load of cores together and lie about the synthetic speeds they hit. The real trick is the interconnect and the storage, not cores. Willing to bet that they are not even close on that front to the likes of Cray and companies like Data Direct.

    29. Re:consequences... by guises · · Score: 1

      You're forgetting about communism. We can't not be enemies so long as China doesn't fully and officially embrace capitalism as the one true ism. It just wouldn't be right.

    30. Re:consequences... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      These CPUs are not MIPS based, they are a custom Chinese design that seems to have been inspired by DEC Alpha but is not a direct descendent of it. The IP is 100% Chinese owned, which is a requirement for military use.

      They are actually really impressive chips. Competitive with Intel's latest Xeon Phi range.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    31. Re: consequences... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      How is being antagonistic going to resolve those issues? And do you think China has forgotten Guantanamo, Iraq, Iran-Contra etc?

      If you constantly bring up the other party's past you won't get anywhere. The way forward is to try to cooperate and effect changes in behaviour that way. You don't have to give them the South China Sea, but you don't have to go out of your way to piss them off either.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    32. Re: consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Between tiannamen and GTMO, I wonder who are the retards.... both at the same level... worst.... If Nuremberg trials were applied to US forces in Iraq, a lot of people would hang.... So what? America like all great empire from the past will fall....

    33. Re:consequences... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This happens when you don't allow export of your chips to someone who has the knowledge to design their own chips.
      It gives them the incentive to accelerate development and deployment of their homegrown designs.

      Not only do you lose a business opportunity, you're also in danger of losing your technology leadership.

      The USA has lost supremacy in design and chip performance. Its because the USA relies on one company -- Intel. And there is no competition to achieve better designs than what Intel. Intel should become a fab company, and then allow other companies to produce chip designs that can replace or improve on the existing Intel technology. (When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail).

      Montrealer

  3. Finally, by LichtSpektren · · Score: 5, Funny

    a machine that can play Crysis on medium settings. The world waited with abated breath.

    1. Re:Finally, by wardrich86 · · Score: 1

      I wish I had some mod points for your comment. :(

  4. How many nude photos... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    How many nude photo's did they have to send in to get the loan to built that thing?

    1. Re:How many nude photos... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The computer engineers all posed nude, both individually and as a group. The loan check arrived within minutes, with the only condition "take those photos back, and never send anything like that to us again".

  5. More info at ... by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 5, Informative
    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:More info at ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China's new system, the Sunway TaihuLight. Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops (Linpack is 93 petaflops), according to the latest biannual release today of the world's Top500 supercomputers.

      We can encourage them to run Windows 10 on it and regain our superiority.

    2. Re:More info at ... by tripleevenfall · · Score: 5, Funny

      Reports were that engineers hoped to keep Sunway TaihuLight running Windows 7 in perpetuity, but the system's record-breaking performance caused a forced Windows 10 upgrade to be completed in 2.4 seconds - just too quickly for anyone to hit "Cancel".

    3. Re:More info at ... by greenfruitsalad · · Score: 2

      a commonly known BS is still BS. i am also inclined not to believe anything that comes from china.

    4. Re:More info at ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You are also paranoid.

    5. Re:More info at ... by Qzukk · · Score: 2

      And that's how we know they're lying: there is no Cancel button. Personally, instead of being a dick waving contest I think they're just trying to save face after one of the engineers clicked the X to close the window despite it being widely reported that this will start the Windows 10 install.

      --
      If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
    6. Re:More info at ... by bobbied · · Score: 1

      Naw, they are just using Cheap Chinese knock offs of some AMD processors they purchased on EBay..

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    7. Re:More info at ... by zlives · · Score: 1

      stay on target Mavrick, we are ChinaBashing here, leave MS bash$ on edge /.

    8. Re:More info at ... by Koen+Lefever · · Score: 1

      Reports were that engineers hoped to keep Sunway TaihuLight running Windows 7 in perpetuity, but the system's record-breaking performance caused a forced Windows 10 upgrade to be completed in 2.4 seconds - just too quickly for anyone to hit "Cancel".

      It runs on Raise OS 2.0.5, which is "Linux based" - whatever that may be (a fork of the kernel? a distro?).

      Naw, they are just using Cheap Chinese knock off of some AMD processors they purchased on EBay..

      They are using the ShenWei SW26010 CPU.

      --
      /. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
    9. Re:More info at ... by MiniMike · · Score: 1

      And that's how we know they're lying: there is no Cancel button.

      The Cancel button only appears in pirated versions of Windows 7.

    10. Re: More info at ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, but there is a post-install decline EULA button (at least there was here) that allowed us to rollback.

    11. Re:More info at ... by GeekWithAKnife · · Score: 1


      Presumably the top notch engineers involved installed the patch and changed registry keys to reject the upgrade; but then Microsoft changed the patch status from "Extremely super critical" to "We'll ram it down your throats".

      It's quite possible no one will ever update windows again by kill the update service and blacklisting all MS IPs.

      It can be funny but when you run an organisation an unwanted upgrade can cause serious damages.

      --
      A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
  6. Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha? by pecosdave · · Score: 1

    Is it really "not U.S. chips" if they completely reverse engineered the Alpha and started developing it again?

    --
    The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
  7. "Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5" by LichtSpektren · · Score: 1

    I was curious what OS it runs. TOP500 says "Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5". Googling "Sunway" is just giving me some Malaysian resort town, and "RaiseOS" yields nothing at all. Does anyone know anything about this OS? Is it Linux?

    1. Re:"Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5" by wkwilley2 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Can't confirm, but more then 98% of all the super computers on the Top500 run Linux of some variety, so more than likely it is.

      --
      Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
    2. Re:"Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5" by homes32 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I was curious what OS it runs. TOP500 says "Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5". Googling "Sunway" is just giving me some Malaysian resort town, and "RaiseOS" yields nothing at all. Does anyone know anything about this OS? Is it Linux?

      from TFA: "TaihuLight, which is installed at China's National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, uses ShenWei CPUs developed by Jiangnan Computing Research Lab in Wuxi. The operating system is a Linux-based Chinese system called Sunway Raise. "

    3. Re:"Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5" by mrchaotica · · Score: 2

      From the article:

      The operating system is a Linux-based Chinese system called Sunway Raise.

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  8. Yes but how many of the chips are clones or copies by BenderTheRobot · · Score: 1

    Yes but, how many of the chips are clones or copies?

  9. Is it any easier to program than the Tianhe-2? by Zandamesh · · Score: 2

    Questions for those who know: Tianhe-2 is notoriously hard to program for. Will this be any better? And will USA ever catch up?

    --
    Lo and behold, for I am a sig!
    1. Re:Is it any easier to program than the Tianhe-2? by Junta · · Score: 1

      I would anticipate it's even worse. Though it's not about programmability, the amount of memory relative to the compute shows that this system is pretty much designed to do one thing and one thing well: xhpl. Everything else is questionable.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    2. Re:Is it any easier to program than the Tianhe-2? by MiniMike · · Score: 4, Funny

      ...Tianhe-2 is notoriously hard to program for. ... And will USA ever catch up?

      The Chinese currently have beat everyone else in this, but I believe there are several U.S. government funded teams working on developing supercomputers that are increasingly difficult to program.

    3. Re:Is it any easier to program than the Tianhe-2? by Olorion · · Score: 1
      From TFA, TaihuLight is running "sizeable applications," which include advanced manufacturing, earth systems modeling, life science and big data applications, said Dongarra. This "shows that the system is capable of running real applications and [is] not just a stunt machine," Dongarra said.

      So the TaihuLight is a real machine, not a toy as you imply.

    4. Re:Is it any easier to program than the Tianhe-2? by Junta · · Score: 1

      The ratio of compute to memory says otherwise. Note that when it comes to talking up the systems in the press, *every* one will overstate the practicality of their system, and generally speaking there's no real way to call people on what they claim. Generally speaking, the top several contenders in a top500 are made in some way to have it be fairly challenging to put it to *practical* use, because they spent a disproportionate amount of resource for the sake of making the Top500 (to have a *practical* system that hits that high a score would be even more astronomical cost). This is not a specific indictment of the current Chinese config, but a fact of life for top of this list which is driven by a very specific benchmark. It's kind of looking at dragsters, which are useless on anything but a straight short course of pavement, but they accelerate very very hard.

      Depending on the list, sometimes you might as well skip over the top 10 or 20 before you get to systems that are actually designed in a practical way for solving real problems.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    5. Re:Is it any easier to program than the Tianhe-2? by Olorion · · Score: 1

      The important question, which you have tried to obfuscate, is: Which machine, anywhere in the world, can do more real work?

      The heavy applications exist and are evidently working well enough to satisfy Jack Dongarra, a professor of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee. As one of the head honchos atTop500.org, the list of the world's top supercomputers, Dongarra is difficult to impress -- and he was clearly impresssed.

      1.31 petabytes of memory is quite a lot, and the TaihuLight's interconnect is clearly very efficient. I imagine that's why Dongarra liked it.

    6. Re:Is it any easier to program than the Tianhe-2? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually the Coral machines should be easier to fit with the problems than the Titan, as the nodes are "fatter." Unified memory address space will help too.

    7. Re:Is it any easier to program than the Tianhe-2? by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      The US already got there: I was at Los Alamos when the RoadRunner, the first petaflop supercomputer was installed. I knew (well still know) some of the supercomputer guys, and oh boy was there a lot of grousing in Hot Rocks about programming that machine. It was a hybrid cell/Opteron architecture. That meant programming in 3 instruction sets with rather different properties, especially as one didn't have access to anything other than essentially cache memory (the Cell SPU) and the Cell PPC core had to spend a lot of time dicking around with the DMA unit to make sure memory was ready when it was needed. And then of course it had to be punted back and forth between the cell and opteron for stff which the other CPU was not so good at. Then you've got the usual gumf of MPI between nodes which is about the only sane way to do that anyway.

      The more modern ones with lots of GPUs are less of a pain because the tools are more mature, that was really the first of them, with all the problems being fresh and new.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    8. Re:Is it any easier to program than the Tianhe-2? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      the amount of memory relative to the compute shows that this system is pretty much designed to do one thing and one thing well: xhpl. Everything else is questionable.

      The number of compute cores in TaihuLight is extremely high because it uses custom chips with 260 cores on each chip. TaihuLight has a total of 40960 nodes (chips) and 1.3 PetaBytes of memory.

      The top two US machines on the list both uses 16 core chips and have 0.7 PetaByte of memory for 35040 nodes and 1.6 PetaByte for 98304 nodes respectively.

      So TaihuLight actually has significantly more memory per node than the top two US entries.

    9. Re:Is it any easier to program than the Tianhe-2? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      TaihuLight has 32 GB per node of DDR3 memory (1.3 PiB total memory/40960 nodes = 32 GB). From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(supercomputer)#Hardware, Titan (#3 on the current Top 500 and the highest ranking US system) has a node architecture that consists of a 16-core Opteron, which has 32 GB of DDR3 memory associated with it, and a Tesla K20X with 6 GB of GDDR5 associated with it. So TaihuLight doesn't have "significantly more memory per node" than Titan.

      In general, I suspect it's fairly pointless to compare TaihuLight to traditional x86 or even hybrid x86/GPU systems. It'll be more interesting to see how Knight's Landing systems compare since it is also a manycore chip. Hopefully we'll see some KNL entries in upcoming Top 500 lists for comparison.

  10. Anybody know more details about the CPUs? by mrchaotica · · Score: 1

    The article mentions that the cluster uses "ShenWei CPUs" but doesn't give details, and the wiki only talks about chips that were released in 2010 and earlier. Is it using the Alpha instruction set (as Wikipedia seems to imply), or does it have additional instructions, or is it using something else entirely? Can you buy these things (and compatible motherboards) of AliExpress? Do they have an equivalent to IME?

    --

    "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    1. Re:Anybody know more details about the CPUs? by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 5, Informative

      ... The processor is divided into four core groups, each with 64 computing processing elements (CPE) and a management processing element (MPE). Each core group also includes a memory controller delivering an aggregate memory bandwidth of 136.5 GB/second on each socket. It runs at a relatively modest 1.45 GHz and supports just a single execution thread per core ...

      The above was from my (rejected) submission on the same computer

      As it is too big I won't quote the entire submitted article here, suffice to give you the link to it - https://slashdot.org/submissio...

      --
      Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    2. Re:Anybody know more details about the CPUs? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Do they have an equivalent to IME [slashdot.org]?

      Why would that matter? They've built a line of chips for their system. These are probably suitable for their needs and do exactly what they wanted them to do. Any management element is something they worked out for themselves and does what they decided it would do.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:Anybody know more details about the CPUs? by mrchaotica · · Score: 1

      It doesn't matter to them. It matters to me because I'm interested in owning desktop PCs with unusual architectures and don't like backdoors.

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    4. Re:Anybody know more details about the CPUs? by slashdot_commentator · · Score: 1

      ARM based chips currently don't have microcoded backdoors. You can build a "slow" desktop based on that, for your purposes.

      --
      There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
    5. Re:Anybody know more details about the CPUs? by hattig · · Score: 1

      All the high-level technical details apart from the ISA ("not Alpha") you could want.

      http://www.netlib.org/utk/peop...

    6. Re:Anybody know more details about the CPUs? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Well, some of them do, if I'm not mistaken, but Raspberry Pi 3 (e.g.) should be still clean.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    7. Re:Anybody know more details about the CPUs? by kriston · · Score: 1

      Check this LinkedIn profile:

      https://www.linkedin.com/in/ch...

      "Help other members to migrate Ubuntu desktop to SW64 and Loongson architecture (SW64 is Shen Wei 64-bit, based on Alpha; and Loongson is a kind of machine of MIPs)."

      And:
      "At present, Migrating several Applications to Ubuntu desktop under SW64 and Loongson architecture (it is mainly about qemu development with qemu upstream members)."

      --

      Kriston

    8. Re:Anybody know more details about the CPUs? by legRoom · · Score: 1

      the new ShenWei (roughly translates to The Wrath of God in Mandarin)

      Umm... what? Got an official source for that translation? Because that sounds like propagandistic nonsense to me.

      1) China is an officially atheist state, and on that basis alone I doubt they would choose such a name.

      (China did have an ancient tradition of monotheism, but it ceased to be the dominant religion a long, long time ago. Moreover, in ancient times it was closely associated with the position of the emperor, considered an enemy of the people under Communism. In modern times, it is associated with Christianity and Islam, both regarded as dangerous (albeit in somewhat different ways) foreign ideas by the government.)

      2) A naive effort using Google translate suggests that the actual translation is something more like "Extend Prestige" which sound far more plausible, coming from a (nominally) Communist government. Translating the other way, starting from the English "The Wrath of God", doesn't yield anything remotely resembling ShenWei.

    9. Re:Anybody know more details about the CPUs? by slashdot_commentator · · Score: 1

      Which ones? Based on what technical detail? Raspi 3 has a "current" ARM chip; by your presumption, it should "not" be clean.

      --
      There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
    10. Re: Anybody know more details about the CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't you run this town?

    11. Re:Anybody know more details about the CPUs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe it is all fake and the computer does not exist so they are invoking the Wrath of God once SOME PERSON realizes the truth and starts asking questions? So the translation is ironic because if no one asks quickly, they just have to keep going til they invoke ShenWei. Funny that this interpretation sounds real for both translations and in accordance to the character of someone making believe they got it when in fact...

  11. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by myowntrueself · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is it really "not U.S. chips" if they completely reverse engineered the Alpha and started developing it again?

    Hopefully they reverse engineered out all the spy shit that gets built into anything made by a US company (who can be served a national security letter demanding they insert backdoors and not tell anyone about it). Not saying the Chinese won't build their own spy shit into their own chips, but it only makes sense to drop products made by US companies.

    On the other hand, aren't all the 'US made chips' actually made in China anyway, and its really just the intellectual property that is US? And the Chinese don't really give a shit about US intellectual property ownership anyway?

    --
    In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
  12. Re:Impossibru! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Is that some wounded american pride I see?

  13. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    no I think its MIPS that served as the starting ground for most Chinese developed processors.

  14. Whew... by wkwilley2 · · Score: 2

    A quadrillion? That's alot of flops.

    --
    Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
    1. Re: Whew... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's a lot of flopping dicks

    2. Re:Whew... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Indeed. Approaching Lebron James scale.

    3. Re:Whew... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "a lot" is two words.

    4. Re:Whew... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "a lot" is two words.

      "flops" is not a word.

  15. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If the Americans are the ones required to use espionage to figure out how they work, rather than the other way around, I'd say yes...

  16. Where is the news? by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A computer built with hardware that was NOT made in China, that would be news.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    1. Re:Where is the news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But "Designed in California" bro?

    2. Re:Where is the news? by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      C'mon, can't we go one thread without someone mentioning how gay Apple's design looks like?

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    3. Re:Where is the news? by zenlessyank · · Score: 1

      Well, to be honest, I think the actual chips for Intel and AMD are made in Malaysia or Taiwan. I have some old AMD chips that were made in Germany. But yes, that is still a very true statement and funny... Someone was complaining last week to whipslash about not getting mod points in a long time and since I read that post, I haven't gotten any mod points to give out :( , else I would mod this up.

    4. Re:Where is the news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Here's one. It does seem to have the necessary amount of hyperbole though.

    5. Re:Where is the news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A computer built with hardware that was NOT made in China, that would be news.

      The news is not where its manufactured, but where its designed and developed.

      Its entirely a chinese technology.

      The US government believed they will stop then by negating access from Intel tech, and the chinese show them they don't need it at all.

    6. Re:Where is the news? by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      That thread is about security and how to protect your privacy, why should anyone be talking about Apple there?

      (ok, 'nuf Apple bashing for today, but you have to admit, he was asking for it)

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    7. Re:Where is the news? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1
      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    8. Re:Where is the news? by zenlessyank · · Score: 1

      Well, until we have nothing left to bash, Bourne Again Shell.

    9. Re:Where is the news? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      What's really interesting is that they aren't using a western ISA either, this is a Chinese developed one that is not compatible with x86 or ARM etc. It seems to have been developed from scratch and it's not entirely clear what software supports it, but it's exciting because apparently the performance is excellent and anything that is not x86/ARM is interesting.

      Away from the desktop Chinese CPUs look really attractive. Low cost, high performance, unlikely to feature NSA/GCHQ backdoors and often they are quite open about their designs. As it is, if you want a completely open machine you have to buy a Chinese MIPS based Loongson CPU. The more options the better.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    10. Re:Where is the news? by Baloroth · · Score: 1

      The news is about the chips being Chinese "designed" (quotes because I don't think anyone seriously thinks they designed them from scratch), but as a side note China actually only has a dozen or so semiconductor fabs. Most fabs are in the US, with Taiwan a (distant) second (assuming that list isn't woefully incomplete).

      Manufacturing only goes to China because labor there is cheap. For stuff like semiconductor fabrication, offshoring to China makes very little sense, since much of the work is automated anyways (most of the cost is in the fab itself), and what isn't requires strict quality control and skilled labor.

      --
      "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
    11. Re:Where is the news? by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

      > unlikely to feature NSA/GCHQ backdoors

      Chips from China. No backdoors. Riiiiiight.

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    12. Re: Where is the news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The same happened in the UK. UK semiconductor companies weren't allowed access time the advanced chip layout design software of the time, so ARM was set up.

    13. Re:Where is the news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Its entirely a chinese technology.

      Are you saying it's not based on stolen designs from Intel or AMD? Which stolen design is it based on then?

    14. Re:Where is the news? by zrobotics · · Score: 2, Informative

      Taiwan actually has more capacity than the US. http://m.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/2016/03/02/459646/Taiwan-overtakes.htm/ shows Taiwan with 21.7% of the world total capacity; North America as a whole with 14.2% and China at 9.7%. Intel isn't locating the true cutting edge processes in Asia, but claiming taiwan is a distant second list a laughable claim. They aren't cranking out xeons, but the ARM market is a huge part of the cpu game.

    15. Re:Where is the news? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Perhaps, but I'm less worried about the Chinese ones because the Chinese government has a lot less power to screw up my life.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    16. Re:Where is the news? by larryjoe · · Score: 1

      A computer built with hardware that was NOT made in China, that would be news.

      If we're talking about high-end processors, then chips made in China would be news. How many Intel fabs are there in China? How about TSMC? How about Samsung? Foxconn assembly is not the same as fabbing a chip.

    17. Re:Where is the news? by zlives · · Score: 1

      I understand what you are saying and as such agree to the sentiment. The issue we the people have against US govt back-doors is that it goes against the very foundation of our Constitution and thus is morally and politically repulsive. Thus your statement about the Chinese govt.

      However the problem is not the Chinese govt (unless you have an interesting job, which I don't) but the hackers which may have been sponsored by china at some point and thus familiar with the chip capability and the ability to screw up your personal life.

    18. Re:Where is the news? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Well, we know for a fact that the NSA screws with US companies, to the point of installing backdoors in their hardware. We aren't sure that the Chinese government is so reckless. They don't need to be really, their own citizens have to install backdoors for them by law and foreign companies/governments haven't figured out the basics of cyber security yet. So on balance, you are probably safer with Chinese CPUs.

      The Loongson chips in particular are very open and available for auditing. No binary blobs required for their chipsets, which is why RMS uses them. Since such binary blobs and closed firmware are a primary attack vector for western spooks and hackers I'd say that's a big win too.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    19. Re:Where is the news? by jon3k · · Score: 1

      What's really interesting is that they aren't using a western ISA either, this is a Chinese developed one that is not compatible with x86 or ARM etc

      It's based on DEC Alpha.

    20. Re:Where is the news? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      It's not based on Alpha. The design seems to have borrowed a few ideas but it's not a compatible ISA or a direct descendant. The IP is fully Chinese owned too, a requirement for military use.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    21. Re:Where is the news? by jon3k · · Score: 1
    22. Re:Where is the news? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Rumours. I know some native Chinese speakers, they say it was inspired by Alpha but is not a direct descendant of it.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    23. Re:Where is the news? by jon3k · · Score: 1

      What's really interesting is that they aren't using a western ISA either, this is a Chinese developed one that is not compatible with x86 or ARM etc. It seems to have been developed from scratch and it's not entirely clear what software supports it, but it's exciting because apparently the performance is excellent and anything that is not x86/ARM is interesting.

    24. Re:Where is the news? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      I read a novel once. It was written from scratch, but clearly look inspiration from other novels because it was written in this thing called "English" and used many common phrases, some of them dating back to Shakespeare.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  17. In England by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We call them crisps.

    1. Re:In England by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Also, we call fries chips, pants trousers, and underwear pants. There is no such thing as aluminum or cilantro. I hope this clears things up.

      Captcha: "partly"

    2. Re:In England by zenlessyank · · Score: 1

      What is their number? Let me give them a ring.

  18. Back in my day by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Anything "Made in Japan" was junk. You always looked for the "Made in USA" label for quality. Definitely feels like the US passed the torch on to China.

    1. Re:Back in my day by zenlessyank · · Score: 1

      Like Gremlin, or Pacer, or maybe Edsel. To be able to compete in the car market with the rules levied from WW2, I would say they did OK.

    2. Re: Back in my day by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Japanese had a process of constant refinement. They were starting manufacturing from scratch so the companies would make mistakes, not having technical translators for customer support, not have quality control or feedback systems. But eventually they worked it all out and moved up the chain. The manufacturing moved to Taiwan and Korea. Now it moved to China.

  19. Arogance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This follows a U.S. government decision last year to deny China access to Intel's fastest microprocessors.

    Our government seems to be stuck in the 1990s. They don't understand that intelligence and creativity isn't a monopoly of "Merica.

    It should also show all of you who took Econ 101 at Ithaca Community College that "Comparative Advantage" is a fairy tale taught by academics who know nothing of today's globalized World.

    1. Re:Arogance by aussersterne · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I used to teach a pretty decent load of Chinese students in my classes in Manhattan (I taught at both NYU and on CUNY). By the '00s, they were significantly more creative, sophisticated, well-rounded, and learned (I make no claims about "intelligence") than my American students, who were really sort of "decadent" in the worst, stereotypical ways—knew only a few things about a few things but a lot about consumer goods and fashion, and didn't seem to think they needed to work, just didn't feel the global pressure from competing workers. Very entitled.

      The Chinese students tended to cluster in 'A' territory and always approached me after class to talk about class topics until I had to leave, then followed up with serious questions by email. The American students always had one or two in the 'A' group and the rest clustering around low B and high C, and it was a struggle just to learn their names, as they had nothing at all to say to me unless I called on them in class. Ironically, many of the Chinese students had better formal English as well, though there were always also about half that were clearly 'winging it' and needed ESL—but were killing it in class performance anyway, managing to learn and to get through books by relying on a dictionary, a study group, and sheer determination.

      --
      STOP . AMERICA . NOW
    2. Re:Arogance by nbauman · · Score: 2

      Jimmy Breslin, the New York Daily News columnist, was the first to discover the ascendency of Chinese science students in NYC.

      He saw that the top scorers in the computer game machines at Bronx High School of Science all had Chinese names.

    3. Re:Arogance by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      I'm pretty sure the American students can still find gainful employment in the field of programming, the music industry, the film industry, or at least in high-speed pizza delivery.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    4. Re:Arogance by del_diablo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But that statement in itself isn't worth anything. You where teaching filtered Chinese Students in a elite topic, outside of China. Some part of a given is that they will be better than the locals, based on the fact they are export.
      That said, the statement is worth something, as a cultural examination.

    5. Re:Arogance by orlanz · · Score: 3, Informative

      Not to hit against the "Chinese are hard working and intelligent" meme you got going there. But you are talking about NYU... its an Arts college. A ton of Actors come out there every year. Not exactly a STEM focused group. Your foreign students who are usually the most well off (financially and educationally) in their native countries aren't exactly going up against the best and brightest of America (again, in STEM fields). How would you rate the Chinese in Performance Arts or History or Social Sciences?

      Additionally, keep in mind, most Americas don't ever need to work anywhere has hard in terms of labor nor have as many unfair obstacles as foreigners. They have no need nor pressure to push themselves to those extremes just to make a living. So they can take it easy and still have a life that is better off than 50/60/70% of the world?

      Not to say that Indians, Japanese, Africans, and Chinese aren't giving the natives a run for their money. But lets keep things relative here. People who come here to study aren't exactly average nor grew up in an easy environment. I would accept the argument that the top 10% there are probably better and larger than our top 30%, but I think its a stretch to say that Americas are that far behind.

    6. Re:Arogance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Cool story bro.

    7. Re:Arogance by NoImNotNineVolt · · Score: 1

      Not to hit against the "Chinese are hard working and intelligent" meme you got going there. But you are talking about NYU... its an Arts college. A ton of Actors come out there every year. Not exactly a STEM focused group.

      NYU's machine learning graduate program is highly regarded and has been ranked among the top 10 in the nation.

      --
      Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
    8. Re:Arogance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This. I used to teach at an elite university and the Chinese students were top notch. Then I spent time at another institution in Europe much lower in the academic pecking hierarchy. The Chinese students there were devoid of initiative to a degree I've never seen even in the most laid back local students. Once instructed what to do, they would do a good job, but they were constitutionally incapable of getting started on anything. My guess is that it has something to do with the communist system and repression of individual initiative.

    9. Re:Arogance by BlueKitties · · Score: 2

      China is a billion strong, you're only going to see the best and brightest make it to top overseas Universities.

      That reflects on what it takes to rise to the top in a large, overpopulated country with rampant poverty - you worked with the best of the best of the best.

      --
      "Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
    10. Re:Arogance by orlanz · · Score: 1

      If you are going to get that specific, most colleges and universities fall into a Top 10 in many things.

      But NYU is also Top 25 in Drama. #2 in Film for 2015 & 2014; #3 for 2013.

    11. Re:Arogance by m00sh · · Score: 1

      I used to teach a pretty decent load of Chinese students in my classes in Manhattan (I taught at both NYU and on CUNY). By the '00s, they were significantly more creative, sophisticated, well-rounded, and learned (I make no claims about "intelligence") than my American students, who were really sort of "decadent" in the worst, stereotypical ways—knew only a few things about a few things but a lot about consumer goods and fashion, and didn't seem to think they needed to work, just didn't feel the global pressure from competing workers. Very entitled.

      The Chinese students tended to cluster in 'A' territory and always approached me after class to talk about class topics until I had to leave, then followed up with serious questions by email. The American students always had one or two in the 'A' group and the rest clustering around low B and high C, and it was a struggle just to learn their names, as they had nothing at all to say to me unless I called on them in class. Ironically, many of the Chinese students had better formal English as well, though there were always also about half that were clearly 'winging it' and needed ESL—but were killing it in class performance anyway, managing to learn and to get through books by relying on a dictionary, a study group, and sheer determination.

      As a teacher, never ever stereotype anyone. Treat each student on their own metrics and not as a subset of some group that you deem them to be in.

      There could be other explanations. In my case, I found out that Chinese students had already learned the material in their home country. This was their second go at taking the class in English.

    12. Re:Arogance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fair enough. I know very little about NYU.

      I was only chiming in because I'm considering going back to school for machine learning again and was checking if there was anything around here worth applying to other than Columbia. I was surprised to see NYU so high up the list.

      Too lazy to log in again, sorry :P

      --9v

    13. Re:Arogance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's great, most cultures I see this too w/Asian kids (China/India): kids are very good at text book learning. They know the formula and remember when to apply them based on textbook examples. It's very well needed in problems of today.

      BUT.... for problems of tomorrow....

      Experience and problem solving skills are WAY lacking with these kids as well as out of the box thinking on new applications--they just can't break out of the academia's "paradigm way of thinking". I've seen some go into a blank stare and can't solve anything but what was provided as example from a textbook. Some US schools provide these problem solving skills, but it's rare kids pick it up.

      Hence PROS and CONS to the school ethic style.

  20. pointless brute force super computing by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Other than the singular purpose of doing the rare but interesting exascale problem the real utility of figuring out how to build exascale is to figure out how to build petascale cheaply on the "desktop". DOE's target for exascale is a scalable architecture that will sip mere megawatts of enegy this means that when they get there petawatt will be of the order of magnitude of 10KW. in other words, something easily power by a car engine. it will mean that petascale will be ubiquitous. Every hospital could have one in their basement.

    the Titan super computer at oakridge has 299,008 cores and 18petaflops. if they built 5 of these they could hit 91 petaflops with 1.5 million cores. That's ten time fewer than the chinese super computer requires.

    Now cores ain't everything. ultimately it's petaflops per watt but I don't have those statistics so I'm using cores as a proxy. I will admit that there is a school of thought in computer that having a lot of slow low power cores may be better than fewer fast high power cores whenever the bottleneck is memory bandwidth. And since I don't know the chinese architecture I don't know if that's what they are doing here.

    Nonethe less. for mere factors of 10, brute forcing is always possible and doesn't really advance the state of the art--- that is, you cant scale that to factors of 1000 by brute force. You have to drop the power per petawatt to get anywhere. Scaling up to more cores can even be counter productive for any problem involving long range coupling between cores. Thus while it gets you more embarassingly paralell flops it doesn't get you better calculations on real problems.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    1. Re:pointless brute force super computing by goombah99 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I found some data on watts. It looks like the chinese computer is 16MW and the Titan is 8MW. So it appears they are using lower power, slower CPUs on the SHenWei. Overall this means they are getting better petaflops per watt than the US computer. Thus I was incorrect in saying it was pointless brute force. They are one the way to lower gigaflops/watt.

      --
      Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    2. Re:pointless brute force super computing by goombah99 · · Score: 1

      It's also worth noting that the Titan has a lot of NVIDIA chips too, so it's not 100% AMD either, and I don't know where either of those is made. Likely china I suppose.

      --
      Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    3. Re:pointless brute force super computing by hattig · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yeah, the Chinese Supercomputer is using 1.45 GHz 260-core custom-ISA 64-bit RISC chips.

      Yup, 260 cores. Each with a 256-bit FMAC SIMD unit. It's not a traditional CPU architecture, it clearly uses some aspects of Intel's Larrabee/Knights Landing platform, and GPU architectures (in particular the cache arrangement).

      Each chip can process 3 TFLOPS of double precision floating point.

    4. Re:pointless brute force super computing by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Informative

      Titan manages 466kW/petaflop, while TaihuLight manages 164kW/petaflop. The Chinese computer is much, much more efficient. It's also worth noting that much of Titan's performance is due to GPUs, which are not general purpose CPUs and can't be used for arbitrary computing tasks.

      Comparing the number of cores is pointless, it's the work done per watt and per yuan that's important. And it's not like you could just scale Titan up, it would need about 90MW just to run which causes both supply and severe heat problems.

      The CPUs the Chinese have built are really impressive. Performance is on a par with Intel's latest Xeno Phi chips, but they developed their own ISA and silicon from scratch, and then compilers and a Linux port.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  21. Re:Impossibru! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yeah, right. Because we all know that the Chinese would NEVER dare steal our shit (like they do, every.single.day).

  22. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by kriston · · Score: 5, Informative

    The older systems, like Longson, are MIPS using a questionable license with patent problems.

    These systems are directly derived from DEC Alpha.

    So, not homegrown, more like "homecloned" from US chips and then enhanced.

    In other words, the hard work was already done, and they just took it.

    --

    Kriston

  23. Summary invalidates headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Theoretical maximum performance is not what we use to measure actual, real-world rankings.

    1. Re:Summary invalidates headline by slashdot_commentator · · Score: 1

      93 petaflops in linpack. Nothing theoretical about that. Go back to pouting in your mom's basement. Jingoism and chanting is a jock thing.

      --
      There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
  24. Teachable moment for the pols by DarkOx · · Score: 4, Informative

    So the moral of the story here ought to be that while the USA may be a tech leader, it isn't as if there are not tech centers in the rest of the world more than capable of building technology on the leading edge.

    So when people the like the FBI director make asinine statements like how people will switch to non US crypto technologies and message platforms only 'theoretically' they should respond with laughter.

    CONgress and the Administration need to pull their heads out of their assess (which will be hard given how far up there they are) and realize that if they insist on stupid export controls and technology that legally has to be broken by design; they will accomplish none of their security goals and only harm our economy in the process.

    --
    Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
    1. Re:Teachable moment for the pols by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      So when people the like the FBI director make asinine statements like how people will switch to non US crypto technologies and message platforms only 'theoretically' they should respond with laughter.

      That guy should just shut up. Lobbying is NOT his damned job. The agency can publish a normal position paper and then move on.

    2. Re:Teachable moment for the pols by javilon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Absolutely.
      What this news tell us is Intel could have sold 10 million cores but was forbidden from doing so. The money that could have gone Intel's way have been used to improve Chinese chip manufacturing and the USA has failed to achieve the goal of stopping China from building a supercomputer more advanced than the best one in USA.

      Hilarious

      --


      When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
    3. Re:Teachable moment for the pols by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ... 'theoretically' they should respond with laughter.

      In this case, it seems old politicians have interns with the smarts to know Mr Brennan is lying. The politicians have been told they can't control the market. It'll be interesting to see what happens next: The USA has a habit of assuming they can control the labour/technology supply for the whole world and pass laws that paradoxically hurt the USA but no-one else.

    4. Re:Teachable moment for the pols by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      CONgress and the Administration need to pull their heads out of their assess (which will be hard given how far up there they are) and realize that if they insist on stupid export controls and technology that legally has to be broken by design; they will accomplish none of their security goals and only harm our economy in the process.

      Basically they are trying to limit access to technologies that can be used for weapons, or at least delay it. The goal is not really a bad one.

      The scarier bit is things like Boeing builds plant in china. Sure that is only an assembly plant, but it offers more avenues to ship our IP oversees. The interesting bit is Boeing threatened to cut jobs if the ex-im bank wasn't renewed, and then cut jobs right after it was.

      Either way, if your stuff is getting built in China, then sooner or later they will be able to build it without you....

  25. Re:Impossibru! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is my guess as well. Not to bag on the Chinese, but I feel like this is a dog-n-pony show to show up the U.S. Gov't who denied them Xeons.

  26. They built it but does it work? by JoeyRox · · Score: 0

    Or even turn on?

    1. Re:They built it but does it work? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It does, and it beats the living daylights out of the smaller, inferior American computers. So start learning how to suck it up, because as an American you'll have to do it over, and over, and over again during this century.

    2. Re:They built it but does it work? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
  27. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by slack_justyb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It really is non-US chips no matter how they got the original blueprints. The notion of US intellectual property in China is laughable at best. Additionally, China may not have a lot of folks that can invent, and that pretty much goes for all other countries because Intel is actually that good at being a brain drain but I digress, but they are incredibly good at trial and error/educated guessing on quite remarkable scales. So while they may not invent the process for 5nm chips, once they see one done and get a few pictures of the process, they're pretty good at putting the pieces together to get up and running.

    However, it is my opinion that the bigger point here isn't that China is great at stealing technology, it is that China, and more so the world, honestly doesn't need American technology especially if the Americans are so hell bent in making insecure devices and resorting to petty trade restrictions to maintain some sort of faux-superiority position because the American legislative body finds in unstylish to fund actual research to maintain a real superiority position or they feel that real superiority is found in funding some guy digging a tunnel to extract black rocks, pumping dead liquid dinosaur remains from the ground, or ensuring that humans build crap at ineffective rates.

    If anything Americans should take this as a sign that their priorities are insanely messed up. Doubtful that they would actually do anything about it, but at least they can know that all their Jerry Springer level bickering will ultimately mean that they need to resort to more and more useless childish games on ensuring that they stay relevant on the global stage. The downside to that is that the rest of the world has to suffer these stupid antics because Americans can't grow up and admit that they're loosing the top spot.

  28. Perhaps not a lie... by Junta · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It's entirely possible this is an extravagant expense to hit #1 in Top500, but not able to do anything else. Looking at the architecture, about all that system can do is run xhpl really good. They talk about practical applications, but it seems the described system skimps on all sorts of things that would be important for real work, but not needed as much for xhpl benchmark runs.

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    1. Re:Perhaps not a lie... by Z00L00K · · Score: 1

      The thing they don't tell is that they will use it to crack encryption. Look out for certified hardware drivers for devices made in China.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  29. WOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    China is going to conquer the world!

  30. Re:Impossibru! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is my guess as well. Not to bag on the Chinese, but I feel like this is a dog-n-pony show to show up the U.S. Gov't who denied them Xeons.

    It's the same way the US government responsed in the late 80s/early 90s about strong encryption. To get a copy of PGP I had to click through all kinds of legalese and forms certifying that I was in fact not going to export it to foreign countries. They seriously considered strong encryption to be munitions, like bullets and bombs. They still do the same thing over Generation III nightvision equipment - civilians can have it, but if you try to take it out of the country it's federal prison time.

    That mentality might have had a chance to work when two conditions were true: we didn't have a global communications network with massive participation, and we actually had our own manufacturing base. Times have changed. The US's actions here are just denying themselves a business opportunity and causing a resurgence of national pride and achievement for foreign nations. If the intention was to "keep them down", it's having the opposite effect.

  31. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    China may not have a lot of folks that can invent ... but they are incredibly good at trial and error/educated guessing

    Do you see the problem with this sentence?

  32. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Is it really "not U.S. chips" if they completely reverse engineered the Alpha and started developing it again?

    Hopefully they reverse engineered out all the spy shit that gets built into anything made by a US company (who can be served a national security letter demanding they insert backdoors and not tell anyone about it). Not saying the Chinese won't build their own spy shit into their own chips, but it only makes sense to drop products made by US companies.

    On the other hand, aren't all the 'US made chips' actually made in China anyway, and its really just the intellectual property that is US? And the Chinese don't really give a shit about US intellectual property ownership anyway?

    Companies like Intel and AMD actually do have their own domestic fabs. It's one reason AMD has had such a hard time keeping up with Intel - these facilities literally cost billions. It takes a ton of capital to shrink process sizes, design new chips, and retool equipment.

    A lot of components on a motherboard would be made abroad, as well as the circuit boards you see on the back of a hard drive or SSD. What really gets made overseas though, is all the embedded chips found in things like cars, TVs, stereos, and appliances. These are usually microcontrollers (likely 8-bit) or nothing much more powerful than a Z80 CPU. This isn't nearly pushing the envelope of technology, it's well-known components that just need to get produced. It makes sense to go with the cheapest volume manufacturer and right now, that's going to be someplace in Asia.

  33. Re:Impossibru! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Yes, it's crazy. I work for UK company that makes imaging that could conceivably be used in nuclear research, and we basically cannot sell to some countries because of that same bullshit. License denied because the authorities believe that the equipment may be used in a location other than that given in the end-user statement (not because of any specific information, just blanket excuse for those countries). But the fact is that there are competitors elsewhere that can sell into those countries, and in some cases upcoming domestic competition in those countries, so the regulations are doing nothing except to put money into the hands of overseas companies at our expense. Bloody joke.

  34. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by 4im · · Score: 1

    These systems are directly derived from DEC Alpha.

    I seriously wonder where they got the Alpha stuff from. Did HP (after the DEC merger) sell it off (Carly?), was it stolen outright?
    I for one mourn the Alphas, they packed serious punch. If only HP had kept those on instead of Itanic... we might be seeing a
    bit more diversity in CPUs than what's essentially a duopoly x86 / ARM (yes, I know there's still SPARC etc., but seriously...).

  35. We must close the supercomputer gap! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Time to order millions of Chinese CPUs on alibaba

  36. Pulls by AntronArgaiv · · Score: 1

    the U.S. banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China's top supercomputing research centers

    That's OK...they'll just use pulls from all the e-waste we ship over there.

  37. Re:Impossibru! by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 2

    But...but...but..Aren't the Chinese supposed to be just imitators?

  38. Congratulations! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Congratulations to all the Chinese students who studied at the USA's graduate & postgraduate electrical & computer engineering programs at the USA's magnificent land grant universities! Making good on your education, guys and gals!

  39. What claim does the go. have on Xeons? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Serious question. Was it developed in part or whole under government contract or with grant money? That's usually how they get to stick their noses in and tell private colleges how to run their affairs, for example. But I would think Intel is profitable enough to do their own R&D with no government money or interference.

    1. Re:What claim does the go. have on Xeons? by zrobotics · · Score: 1

      I don't think any reliable figures exist for Intel's R&D budget, much less the grant money they receive, but you can be sure there is plenty of government interference applied. I doubt they are influencing the direction of research, but the final product certainly has seen government influence.

  40. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > was it stolen outright?
    About 20 years ago, our IT manager at DEC noticed an extremely large download being made to the office in Japan over the weekend. He killed the connection and investigated. They were accessing the Alpha design docs and got away with pretty much everything. They were just starting to download the process docs and didn't get very far. So we at the time knew we'd see something Alphaish popping up in China about a decade later. In 2006 the ShenWei appeared on the scene and it bore striking resemblance to the Alpha 21164A, the processor design docs that happened to be downloaded that weekend long ago.

  41. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by neilo_1701D · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, not homegrown, more like "homecloned" from US chips and then enhanced.

    In other words, the hard work was already done, and they just took it.

    Think back to when Chips & Technologies made their own IBM PC-AT chipset (5 chips replacing the 63 the PC-AT used). It was nothing more than a clever clone... but once the clone happened it set in motion companies other than IBM to develop the standard. Think, for a moment, of the first 80386 system: the Compaq DeskPro 386. That was an original design, not cloned from IBM.

    Yes, I completely agree. This is a "homecloned" system - for now. The next version is likely to have some innovations; the version following even more. Within 5 generations it will be it's own system.

  42. Re: Impossibru! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We (US) do import a lot of people into our tech sector, but they (by and large) don't come from those places. So you are also ignorant. Welcome to the ignorant club, I guess.

  43. Just theoretical by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just like their non-US encryption.

    Right, John Brennan?

  44. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by rahvin112 · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Chinese ability to reverse engineer being a superpower is a hoax. They can't even design jet engines and still have to buy them from Russia, because in the very high tech it's about understanding the basis, not just copying a layout.

  45. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Additionally, China may not have a lot of folks that can invent, and that pretty much goes for all other countries because Intel is actually that good at being a brain drain but I digress, but they are incredibly good at trial and error/educated guessing on quite remarkable scales"

    Ignoring known theft of processes (mandatory Chinese partners long enough to steal methods/IP): check

    " China, and more so the world, honestly doesn't need American technology [theregister.co.uk] especially if the Americans are so hell bent in making insecure devices and resorting to petty trade restrictions to maintain some sort of faux-superiority position because the American legislative body finds in unstylish to fund actual research to maintain a real superiority position or they feel that real superiority is found in funding some guy digging a tunnel to extract black rocks, pumping dead liquid dinosaur remains from the ground, or ensuring that humans build crap at ineffective rates."

    Leap from the topic to grandstanding about how the world doesn't need America because... personal opinions? Bonus points for non-related link: check

    "If anything Americans should take this as a sign that their priorities are insanely messed up. Doubtful that they would actually do anything about it, but at least they can know that all their Jerry Springer level bickering will ultimately mean that they need to resort to more and more useless childish games on ensuring that they stay relevant on the global stage. The downside to that is that the rest of the world has to suffer these stupid antics because Americans can't grow up and admit that they're loosing the top spot."

    National-level attacks mixed with stereotypes: check

    The world has, and will continue to need American tech for the forseeable future. As much as developing economies come up with ways to take over the products we produce, they can't innovate nearly as effectively. That, combined with a gross difference in quality standards, means there will always be demand for American quality goods.

  46. Re:Impossibru! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    thankfully the US never committed wholesale IP theft? Oh wait.. they did...

    Yes, The US Industrial Revolution Was Built On Piracy And Fraud
    https://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130228/01324622146/yes-us-industrial-revolution-was-built-piracy-fraud.shtml

    Perhaps "Alexander Hamilton" is Chinese in your mind?

    Read his “Report on Manufactures" published 1791

  47. We should have ... by PPH · · Score: 1

    ... let them have Intel chips. Then, we could have kept an eye on what they were doing with them.

    Oh, sorry. The ME is only for keeping an eye on our own citizens.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  48. Re:Impossibru! by allcoolnameswheretak · · Score: 1

    I guess its time for the US to steal high-tech from China.

  49. Awwww by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They should have granted them access to the (very expensive and backdoored) Intel processors.

  50. Re: Impossibru! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    hi racist idiot. they come to america specifically to get an american education.

    our colleges are packed with non us citizens.

  51. Re:Impossibru! by MightyMartian · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I'm not sure any nation has put as much work into the development of semiconductor technology as the US. Yes, lots of work was done elsewhere, and yes, lots of people from elsewhere come to the US and work in academia or for private companies working on that technology, but I think the history of the development of computers puts the US in a rather special place; first country to develop a first completely electronic computer, the country that invented the transistor, and the first country to develop an integrated microprocessor was the US. So I'd say the US was at the forefront of a lot of innovations in computing.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  52. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by zrobotics · · Score: 1

    *cough* TSMC *cough* And yes, I know they're pure-play, but their market cap...

  53. Re: Impossibru! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    i think ops point was not wether most people come from india, central and north europe, or asia, but the fact that your country and education system has now failed so completely that you must import tech workers to survive. it seems you just cant stand that theyre right so you have to pick on little details.

  54. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

    There is also PowerPC but again not all that common.
    I remember seeing the Alpha when it first came out and thinking wow that is cool, too bad it will be a really big hit. I kept asking the rep about mass market products that would use it and they looked at me like I was nuts.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  55. Where you get the info from? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... The CPUs in this article are reported to be very similar to DEC Alpha 21164 ...

    Where you obtained the above info that the CPU Chinese use to build their new Super is "very similar to DEC Alpha 21164"

    Care to share your news source with us?

    Thanks!

    1. Re:Where you get the info from? by Koen+Lefever · · Score: 2
      --
      /. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
  56. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by TheSouthernDandy · · Score: 1

    So, not homegrown, more like "homecloned" from US chips and then enhanced.

    In other words, the hard work was already done, and they just took it.

    As can be said of most innovation--building on the shoulders of giants.

  57. Grammar nazi alert by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    China Builds World's Fastest Supercomputer Without U.S. Chip

    Does this mean "world's fastest that doesn't use U.S. chip" or "didn't use U.S. chip to build world's fastest?"

  58. Meanwhile Slashdot connects to.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    OMNIROOT.COM - Domain Informationnew
    Domain OMNIROOT.COM [ Site Info Traceroute RBL/DNSBL lookup ]
    Registrar MARKMONITOR INC. MarkMonitor, Inc.
    Registrar URL http://www.markmonitor.com
    Whois server whois.markmonitor.com
    Created 17-Dec-2004
    Updated 10-Feb-2016
    Expires 17-Dec-2016
    Time Left 179 days 6 hours 34 minutes
    Status clientDeleteProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited clientUpdateProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited clientUpdateProhibited (https://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited) clientTransferProhibited (https://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited) clientDeleteProhibited (https://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited)
    DNS servers NS2.OPS.CYBERTRUST.COM 64.18.26.147
    NS3.OPS.CYBERTRUST.COM 202.125.12.3
    NS4.OPS.CYBERTRUST.COM 193.41.20.132
    ns4.ops.cybertrust.com 193.41.20.132
    ns2.ops.cybertrust.com 64.18.26.147
    ns3.ops.cybertrust.com 202.125.12.3

    Tech Name: Domain Technician
    Tech Organization: Verizon
    Tech Street: 1320 North Court House Road
    Tech City: Arlington
    Tech State/Province: VA
    Tech Postal Code: 22201

    Browser lock is Geotrust Inc.
    Was connecting to gn.symcd.com, then for 1 day it was connecting to eff.org, now it connects to gn.symcd.com AND omniroot.com

    CIA interfering with operations Slashdot?

    1. Re:Meanwhile Slashdot connects to.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      CIA is welcomed here as long as they also post -- as informatively as possible, of course. Enlighten us with back stories from the cold war, and anecdotes from the early days of computer security from the government perspective! ;)

  59. Re:Impossibru! by pablo_max · · Score: 1

    I'd say it's more casual racism.

  60. Can you please calm down, for once? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... China is an officially atheist state ...

    ...

    ... A naive effort using Google translate suggests that the actual translation is something more like "Extend Prestige"

    CCP is a godless communist party in China. CCP's history in China compares to China's thousands of years of history is but miniscule

    Thus, CCP is not, cannot, and will never be the entire China

    Throughout the thousands of years of Chinese history the Chinese worshiped (and still worshiping) their own deity (or deities)

    Old habit dies hard

    China's spaceship is call "Shen Zhou", translate to English "God's Ship" or "God's Vessel"

    Many Chinese weapon systems also have "Shen" in their namesakes, having the meaning of "God" in the name of he product does not mean CCP will automatically interfere

    So, please, stop being such a goddamn asswipe

    Drink some water, calm down, and chill the fuck out!

    1. Re:Can you please calm down, for once? by slew · · Score: 1

      Huh?

      The chip in question is shen1-wei1, which is more like "superior-power" as in lots of MIPS (not wrath of god?).

      The spaceship is slightly different shen2-zhou1, which is more like "divine-ship" rather than god's personal ship.

      Firstly, although they have the same root (shen1), they are not the same character. Secondly, although they are pronounced similar (belying their shared root), they are pronounced with a different tone (one is 1st tone, one is 2nd tone). Saying god's ship would imply that it is the ship-of-god, where a divine ship is simply a ship that travels in the heavens (which is basically a spaceship, right?). In chinese, you might say God's boat like shen-de-zhou (God's own boat) which is not at all what people mean when they say spaceship.

      Of course you can make up a literal translation that has completely bombastic implication, but you have to remember nouns in chinese are basically mostly compound connections of a limited set of "words" whose compound meaning does not translate directly from the translation of its components. If you want, you can do the same thing in english by twisting etymological root words (e.g., google "mortgage etymology" which yields "death pledge"), but nobody really means that shit even though it might be a legit translation.

      FWIW, the historical name china gave itself was shen-zhou (divine state), which is probably why you see so much shen-this, shen-that... Although today calls itself more modestly and less heavenly/divinely zhong-guo (middle nation or perhaps central kingdom), "middle" or "central" doesn't really work as many places as divine...

  61. Re:Impossibru! by MikeMo · · Score: 2

    I am always somewhat stunned by posts like this. People seem to think that "entity1" did it before so it's ok if "entity2" does it now, even when "entity1" did their bad deed a long time ago. Most bizarre. This is firmly in the "two wrongs DO make a right" camp.

  62. Re:Impossibru! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    yes. They are imitating originality now.

  63. Imagine the frame rate in DOOM! by Trashcan+Romeo · · Score: 1

    The frame rate would be so high that the demons would be real!

  64. Does fastest parallel supercomputer really matter? by Solandri · · Score: 1

    a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores [...] theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops

    You can hit ridiculously high numbers of FLOPS if you throw enough cores at it. Folding@home hits about 100 petaFLOPS this way. They're currently at about 200,000 CPUs + GPUs. If they could get 10 million participants, that would project out to 5 exaFLOPS, easily surpassing anything else in the top 500 list. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some criminal botnet is the "fastest supercomputer" by this measure.

  65. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by chriscappuccio · · Score: 1

    The Loongson used unpatented MIPS instructions, only to license the patented instructions later. It is not an encumbered implementation.

  66. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is typical of developing nations. The US did that to the UK in the 19th century. USA eventually got better too.

  67. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by jon3k · · Score: 1

    Companies like Intel and AMD actually do have their own domestic fabs. It's one reason AMD has had such a hard time keeping up with Intel - these facilities literally cost billions.

    AMD has been fabless since 2009.

  68. Re:Does fastest parallel supercomputer really matt by Junta · · Score: 1

    It's arbitrary, but top500 measures the largest systems by their ability to execute xhpl. It's not the *most* interconnect sensitive thing in the world, but it would not fare well on a folding@home, world community grid, etc type application.

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
  69. Regarding the SW64 chip by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 1

    I've run a bit of diging on the SW64 chip that reportedly powered the new ShenWei supercomputer

    Based on the info I've gathered from http://bbs.lemote.com/forum.ph...

    Version 1 of SW64 was 'inspired' by DEC's Alpha 21364 architecture instruction

    By Version 3 (circa 2010), according to the same source, they have something called EKOPath, which, reportedly integrate AMD's X64 instuctions onto Alpha's platform

    As Version 3 of the SW64 chip only comes in (max) 16-core, I believe the SW64 chip that are being used in the ShenWei supercomputer is of the latter version (because they supposed to have 64 cores per node)

    Version 1, 2, and 3 of the SW64 chip has L1, L2 and L3 cache built in. The SW64 chips that are being used for the new ShenWei supercomputer reportedly doesn't have L1, L2, nor L3 cache at all

    Furthermore, the frequency of chip has also increased from 1.1GHz to 1.45GHz, indicating a possible chip node shrinkage from the 65nm to a possible 28nm node that China currently possesses

    That is about what I manage to gather so far

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:Regarding the SW64 chip by cheesybagel · · Score: 2

      The SW64 chips that are being used for the new ShenWei supercomputer reportedly doesn't have L1, L2, nor L3 cache at all

      This sounds more like an omission in the data rather than what it probably has. It would be nonsensical to not have any on-chip cache on a processor like that. It would stall like mad.

  70. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by thegarbz · · Score: 1

    Don't confuse can't with won't. China has some incredible engineers. You should know them, the USA educates a heck of a lot of them.

  71. Re:Impossibru! by Z00L00K · · Score: 1

    That worked in the 70's and maybe 80's, but today it's absurd considering the over the counter available tech that exists combined with the manufacturing being in east Asia now and only a small part of the high tech manufacturing is done in the US or Europe.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  72. Re: Impossibru! by losfromla · · Score: 2

    And they are packed with foreign students because our educational system has been priced out of reach of lower and middle income families due to short-sighted political decisions driven primarily by corporate tax avoidance. Tax avoidance by corporations leads to overly costly education? Yes, because now there aren't enough corporate taxes to fund our public educational institutions so tuition can be free like it was in the days when the political asshats now in control went to school.

    --
    Only I can judge you.
  73. Re:Impossibru! by losfromla · · Score: 2

    And that matters why?

    --
    Only I can judge you.
  74. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Your assertion that China's tendency toward arms tech importation over purely internal innovation represents a fundamental lack of technological development capabilities is sorely in error. China has long employed this strategy, with rather impressive aggregate cost/benefit outcomes over the last few decades, particularly with regard to Soviet era relations and continuing in earnest into the contemporary "new China, new Russia, same basic macro geopolitical landscape" model. Your UID is low enough that you really should understand all of this better than you apparently do. -PCP

  75. lol merica by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is the beginning of the decline of the tech industry in the USA.

    Finally this empire will fall.

    I know, fellow Americans will get butthurt and think I'm trolling. But, I'm not. Watch how you reply; your flag is showing!

    1. Re:lol merica by ebvwfbw · · Score: 1

      You're so funny... You're about 20 years too late. In fact, it's a captain obvious moment.

      As for the empire, we're not an empire. Never were, never wanted to be. That's crazy socialist crap designed to mislead stupid people like you.

  76. There is no L1, L2 nor L3 cache in the chip by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 1

    ... in particular the cache arrangement ...

    Not going to comment on Intel's Larabee / Knight's Landing issue here because I don't know

    From the info as have gathered, the first version of SW64 chip did have some built in cache, but by the new version of SW64 used in the supercomputer, the SW64 has neither L1, nor L2, nor L3 cache

    Each core is allocated 12 KB of instruction cache, along with 64 KB of local scratchpad

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:There is no L1, L2 nor L3 cache in the chip by HiThere · · Score: 1

      64KB should be enough for anyone.

      Outside of being a snark, that's really an almost sensible take in a hugely concurrent computer. It does set a limit on the size of chunk each processor can handle. (At a wild guess, 32 or 16KB, since it's got to be doing something besides holding the data.) But most tasks can be broken into chunks that large (that small?) without causing undue contortions. The real problem is limiting the necessary interprocessor communication, and a large chunk size is one way to do that...but by 16KB you may have gotten most of the benefits.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  77. Re:Impossibru! by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

    I guess its time for the US to steal high-tech from China.

    We already tried this recently, installing a bullet train in California. But the most powerful force for evil in the universe, California NIMBY and Luddite lawyers, has prevented the line from going anywhere.

  78. Not ok, just no position to complain by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 2

    It doesn't make it ok but it does mean that entity1 doesn't really get to complain about it unless they have apologized and made reparations for their past, and to some extent still ongoing (but better disguised), egregious behaviour in this regard. The OP is not saying that what the Chinese are doing is fine but simply that the US is in no position to complain about it because this is how they have behaved, and to some extent still are, behaving (only better disguised as a legal patent system which foreign companies find strangely hard to win against US ones).

  79. Re:Impossibru! by HiThere · · Score: 1

    That can't be! Just the other day we were authoritatively told the secure foreign cryptography was only theoretical.

    --

    I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  80. The Tonya Harding method by Olorion · · Score: 1

    So the U.S. tried to halt China's cheeky supercomputing effort by banning the sale of Intel's chips? Reminds me of Tonya Harding's attempt to kneecap a rival. And the U.S. deservedly got what Tonya got: a big fat loss.

    You know, this entire fiasco reminds me of a woman's "solution" style. Was Hillary Clinton still at State when the Intel ban was hatched?

    1. Re:The Tonya Harding method by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hehe decent relation.

      This was Windows strategy vs Linux as well, until Windows was found to be 100% spyware for the US Government.

  81. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by HiThere · · Score: 1

    Look at the power figures. This is already a highly modified system. I think the term "inspired by" is closer than copied. (There seem to be claims that there was a copy made about 20 years ago, but that's a lot of development time ago.)

    --

    I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  82. Re:Impossibru! by N3wsByt3 · · Score: 2

    But it does mean "entity1" shouldn't have a holier-then-thou attitude. After all, a thief complaining someone else steals from him never makes a very ethical-compelling case, and is being rather hypocritical.

    --
    --- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
  83. Great strategy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    US govt bans the export of HPC parts and starts a new industry outside the US.
    Might have worked last century.
    Let's hope they don't try the same strategy with encryption.

  84. Where do I buy one? by WOOFYGOOFY · · Score: 2

    >>the U.S. was acting to slow that nation's supercomputing development efforts.

    How'd that work out for ya?

    Well, at least according to Corney, they can't do crypto for shit.

    Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind buying a computer with one of these Chinese chips in it. Better than one backdoored up the Yin Yang by a government that can actually ruin my chances in life for having the wrong opinions....Seriously, what do I care if the Chinese government spies on me? Why, that's correct, Mr Chen, my opinions on free speech are dangerously subsersive .... to China.

  85. Re: Impossibru! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And what do they steal? A list please, including USA and Chinese police reports.

  86. Re: patents validated in china by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just a reminder that if a USA patent is not validated in China, it is unprotected IP.

  87. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Funny. NASA buys their rocket systems from Russia? your point?

  88. Re:Impossibru! by jon3k · · Score: 2

    But...but...but..Aren't the Chinese supposed to be just imitators?

    And you think their CPU design built on copied DEC Alpha ISA proves otherwise?

  89. Re:Impossibru! by sydneyfong · · Score: 1

    If you read what the GP said, it never said it was "all right". In fact, I think it's pretty clear that GP was implying that violating IP rights isn't something to be proud of.

    Two wrongs make two wrongs, and it's just fair that both are mentioned.

    It seems you're complaining that somebody is presenting the full picture. It might be irrelevant, but hey, you're not complaining about it being offtopic.

    --
    Don't quote me on this.
  90. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by Kjella · · Score: 1

    The Chinese ability to reverse engineer being a superpower is a hoax. They can't even design jet engines and still have to buy them from Russia, because in the very high tech it's about understanding the basis, not just copying a layout.

    Russia: 143 million
    US: 319 million
    China: 1357 million

    China armed with Russia's tech is a 10x greater threat than Russia. They don't need the best anything to be a superpower, they just need to be able to drag you into a battle of numbers either in manpower, simultaneous threats or manufacturing capacity. Like the Russians fighting the Nazis, they were dying by the millions but Stalin kept sending more and more men to the front. Or Custer's last stand for example. Technology is far from everything in warfare.

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  91. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by rahvin112 · · Score: 1

    NASA has never purchased a Russian Engine. ULA (United Launch Alliance) purchases Russian engines for their Atlas rockets. By 2018 ULA isn't going to be doing launches because SpaceX is going to be 20X cheaper and is already validated to carry crew. That doesn't even factor in the other private launchers like Blue Origin that are gearing up as alternatives too.

    It's funny, the Russians, French and ULA all laughed when SpaceX launched. They aren't laughing anymore, SpaceX is projected to take almost 30% of the launches next year and it's only going to get worse from there as they can beat everyone else on cost. All the national launch programs have never considered cost and will likely be priced right out of the market.

  92. Re:Impossibru! by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

    If the Chinese design is just a copy, then why hasn't anyone built this supercomputer from DEC Alphas?

  93. Re: Impossibru! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Oh yes because copying things is such a wrong. It's not as if duplication was a core part of the universe and that humans have been copying each other's ideas since they first emerged. It's frankly ridiculous and arrogant to think anyone owns an idea.

  94. Re:Impossibru! by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

    It's more about not understanding history and being doomed to repeat it.

    Entity group 1 has strong "IP" laws, which help them and hinder everyone else. Entity 2 is a younger, growing economy for whom the IP laws serve no purpose and are a burden, so they ignore them and grow the economy.

    The US was there, now China is. Right or wrong, it just is. Why would you expect anyone to uphold a bunch of laws imposed from the outside that they had no hand in creating which hinder them to the benefit of the new guard. The US did exactly the same because it's human nature.

    The final step will be of course when the Chinese economy matures further they will start to "respect" IP when it benefits them because they start developing new stuff which they don't want others to copy.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  95. Re:Impossibru! by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

    The machine tools are still nearly all made in the US and Europe. But given the slow progress made in lithography tools in recent years denying them the last two generations of process technology isn't making as much of a difference as it used to.

  96. Re:Impossibru! by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

    You could argue that AMD K7 was like the spiritual successor of the DEC Alpha if you removed the X86 bits off. Same designers, same bus, and everything.

  97. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

    SPARC has seen worse times than this. Like the UltraSPARC V and Rock failures. The current chips are actually decent.

    PowerPC has been essentially put on life support by the current IBM management. So I wouldn't expect much more out of that. Shame.

  98. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

    Yeah this has been a major sticking point in there. But China is developing at least four military aircraft engines right now. One of which (WS-10A) has been already been accepted into service in their twin-engine J-16 fighter bugs and all. They also have a large turbofan in testing for their Y-20 transporter plane. You can find pictures of it (WS-20) in the testbed on the Internet.

  99. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    NASA has never purchased a Russian Engine

    Sure, they just pay Russia $490 million to ferry U.S. astronauts into space instead. It's all good. -PCP

  100. US or not by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They just come over to our universities, reverse engineer the Intel cores and get to experiment with the brightest in the industry as a side benefit, then take it back home and call it a day. China has an advantage cause they have the chip foundaries (thanks to other companies like Apple, IBM, AMD, Moto... and stuff in Taiwan/Japan).

    Heck I have my intern sitting here and he's absorbing everything, wanting to see stuff from schematics & wiring to s/w and algos from historial projects. Bright guy nonetheless, hence why I picked him for an internship, BUT he's debating for a PhD or going home when he graduates--nothing about working in the US. PhD will just help him, going home will help... India. US? just some "free" short term work? Pennys.

    We are not retaining these people to stay--there lies the real problem.

  101. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So you're saying that the fastest super computer in the world today is powered by CPUs that were designed 20 years ago? I find it very hard to believe that CPU designs from 20 years ago is anywhere near competitive in performance compared to current generation CPUs.

  102. Re: Impossibru! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Another butthurt highbrow poser European on /. When will it end.....

  103. Re: Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alph by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
  104. Re: Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alph by rahvin112 · · Score: 1

    Typical. You didn't even bother to read what you posted a link to did you? It states unequivocally that the private company that contracts to do the government launches (ULA) uses russian engines but the US government itself has never used them. Just like I said. Of course you didn't bother to read that either.

  105. Re:Aern't most of China's chips based on the Alpha by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    Quantity has a quality all its own.

    The Soviets produced about 80,000 T34s in WW2.

    The Germans produced 1,300 Tigers.

    If they all met in one big battle of doom, the Germans would have to achieve a kill (not hit) ratio of well over 50% or they'd run out of ammo before the Russians ran out of tanks.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  106. Re:Impossibru! by PingPongBoy · · Score: 1

    > And that matters why?

    It is quite difficult for a country to reach the top of the world in a particular technology because the people there have to be motivated to do the research and build the facilities for R&D. This is a struggle classified as "uphill". Competition is a good motivator. It seems that China's R&D is motivated, at any rate.

    --
    Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.