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China Overtakes US In Latest Top 500 Supercomputer List (enterprisecloudnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Enterprise Cloud News: The release of the semiannual Top 500 Supercomputer List is a chance to gauge the who's who of countries that are pushing the boundaries of high-performance computing. The most recent list, released Monday, shows that China is now in a class by itself. China now claims 202 systems within the Top 500, while the United States -- once the dominant player -- tumbles to second place with 143 systems represented on the list. Only a few months ago, the U.S. had 169 systems within the Top 500 compared to China's 160. The growth of China and the decline of the United States within the Top 500 has prompted the U.S. Department of Energy to doll out $258 million in grants to several tech companies to develop exascale systems, the next great leap in HPC. These systems can handle a billion billion calculations a second, or 1 exaflop. However, even as these physical machines grow more and more powerful, a good portion of supercomputing power is moving to the cloud, where it can be accessed by more researchers and scientists, making the technology more democratic.
Right now the big push is towards the chicken wing. Chicken Wing computing is similar to the cloud.... but it has wings, making your data more readily available and more secure with highly ruffled feathers on the network perimeter.
Chicken wing storage and supercomputing is the future.
China has give or take 4.4 times pop. as USA. They have more middle class people than you have people total. That middle class is growing rapidly because there are a huge number of poor who are being raised up to middle class over time as the country prospers and more and more of the world economy moves to China, and the GDP/pop is going up very fast.
Eventually you will be unable to keep up in any domain: computing, military, mfg, world clout, anything. Rather than drive yourselves into the dirt trying to keep up when you have no hope, better to accept your place as second tier with grace. Do not set the world against you, because you will need allies and partners who will trade with you. Do not treat other countries with the concept you have been. Do not spend all your money on frivolity, military and chest thumping, instead of education and medical care for your people.
USA, you will not keep up with China any more than Thailand (pop 69m) could be an economic and military power comparable to USA.
Please try not to take out the whole world in a fit of blind rage when you become second trumpet.
They are also planning on becoming #1 in quantum computing, radio astronomy, and plans in the work to build the next huge super collider. Meanwhile, in the USA, we are planning on giving rich trust-fund babies even more money they didn't earn, cutting back on our education, and appointing people who hate science to run science-based federal departments.
Unless the researchers have a steady need for the computations, moving work to the cloud makes more sense. Why build a multi-million dollar facility when you can just rent the computers for a day or two for your computation? My guess is the list looks different if the data centers built by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. are factored in.
The 20th century was dominated by the USA. The 19th century was dominated by the United Kingdom. It looks rather likely (as demonstrated by this story) that the 21st century will be dominated by China. Can we find other nice clean examples?
I suggest:
16th century Spain (on the back of New World gold and silver)
Anything earlier than this is well short of global impact, due to lack of communications (particularly between the Americas and the rest of the world)
13th century Mongolia
8th century expansion of Islam
1st century BCE Rome
2nd century BCE Qin
3rd century BCE Macedonia
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Who cares?
Stop thinking in countries! And in US VS THEM. Research never gave a crap about any of that.
First and foremost, we are humans. And first and foremost, our research is meant to benefit all of us! So no matter if the people who did it happen to be born in an Area that we are told to currently call "China" or an area that we are currently told to call "USA" ... yay! Well done! You are a role model for humans everywhere!
I can be happy for them, because in any case, I see them as US, not as THEM.
But maybe my mindset is still a result of our own evil empire imploding. ... *patronizingly* You'll get there. :P
This will change now that Donald Trump is president. If it doesn't I'm sure he'll blame someone else.
Should we really be worried about this? Maybe it's heresy here; but what are they doing with these systems? Are the Chinese using them to solve problems that are more interesting and important, or are they just using them to build prestige? Does it really say anything about the country, or are these systems just the computing equivalent of Dubai skyscrapers? Dubai is blowing us away in the skyscraper dept., but I don't want to live there. China might blow us away in flops on these computers, but if they're not doing any interesting science or other applications on them, so what?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
How big are the clouds at Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc? I suspect if you could afford it, AWS would be #1.
They gave up on this world, too many stinking Westerners, instead they've taken over via world with dragons, hot loli princesses, and talking cats.
Quite the improvement, really.
I'm with you except for the poet part. Have you read German poetry? The Germans I know don't even like German poetry. Maybe I could at least see an argument for opera or symphony, but Poetry?
Oblig Ice station Zebra: "The Russians put our camera made by *our* German scientists and your film made by *your* German scientists into their satellite made by *their* German scientists."
Reagan popped their bubble.
I'm with you except for the poet part. Have you read German poetry?
The Vogons would like a word with you...
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Problem being that 60-75% of their entries are Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent. Whether as a favor to their vendors or for the national image, they let their resources be used to make China look good.
This would be akin to Microsoft, Amazon, and Google colluding to use their install footprint to maximize US share on the list. Instead, they are very secretive and screw their vendors over and don't really have any incentive to prop up the story of US as an HPC leader.
The year of the Linux supercomputer happened before the year of the Linux desktop.
lucm, indeed.
There are plenty of problems that can happily use conviently parallel algorithms. The interconnect latency usually only matters if you are simulating a large memory.
My criterion was world-dominant nations, and world domination tends to require expansion. I'm pacifist, so if you want to make a list of countries which achieved great influence without expansionism, I'd be happy to receive it.
20th C USA and 21st C China are (so far) not so much into expanding their borders, although they are into projecting military and economic power to influence other parts of the world to their advantage. (The non-expansionism is recent: 19th C USA was very much into expanding its borders, and 20th C China nabbed Tibet.)
I'm not sure I agree with your classification of Qin as non-expansionist.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I'm pretty sure the Japanese have their own hardware, and they've also recently acquired ARM which is suddenly relevant for HPC.
Ezekiel 23:20
That's the most painfully obvious troll I've seen in ages. Try fucking harder.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
You think Africa is a country do you?
Holy shit, you're stupid.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Once leadership in any area is established it becomes next to impossible to change the pecking order of dominance. In the past we have seen both the US and Great Britain achieve economic and military dominance. It seems to take a couple of centuries to change that sort of thing. with computers and electronics the problem may be amplified. For example, powerful computers may be used to design ever more powerful computers. Therefore in order to leap beyond another nation one needs to have the most powerful computers already in hand. This same issue may also apply to automation and robotics. In essence if we want the public to do well financially or be safe from foreign enemies we need to clearly dominate the leadership in electronics computing and other areas as well. If we get one step behind we are in huge trouble.