Slashdot Mirror
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.
a machine that can play Crysis on medium settings. The world waited with abated breath.
How many nude photo's did they have to send in to get the loan to built that thing?
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.
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".
...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.