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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.
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.
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?
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 !
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!
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?
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.
Is that some wounded american pride I see?
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. "
From the article:
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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 !
A quadrillion? That's alot of flops.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
But...but...but..Aren't the Chinese supposed to be just imitators?
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
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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]
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.
https://laotsao.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/sw1600-and-alpha-21164/.
/. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
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.
And that matters why?
Only I can judge you.
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).
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." ---
>>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.
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?
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.