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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.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fe7e...
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
http://top500.org/news/china-t...
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6...
http://www.netlib.org/utk/peop...
Or my (rejected) submission at https://slashdot.org/submissio...
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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?
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. "
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 !
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
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
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.
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.
Using western licensed IP of course. These chips are based on MIPS.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.