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US Overtakes China in Top Supercomputer List (bbc.com)
China has been pushed into third place on a list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. From a report: The latest list by Top 500, published twice a year, puts two US machines -- Summit and Sierra -- in the top two places. The US has five entries in the top 10, with other entries from Switzerland, Germany and Japan. However, overall China has 227 machines in the top 500, while the US has 109. Summit can process 200,000 trillion calculations per second. Both Summit and Sierra were built by the tech giant IBM. China's Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which this time last year was the world's most powerful machine, is now ranked at number three, while the country also has the fourth spot in the list.
... to see a good smattering of non-intel CPUs make a good show again. Still waiting on the workstations based on those though. POWER9 is pretty much the only one you can also stuff in a one or two socket deskside box.
American computers operate with numbers in binary format, strings of 1s and 0s, the optimal format for electronic computation.
Chinese computers operate on primitive pictographs, little pictures like Egyptian hieroglyphics to represent objects. That is why a Chinese keyboard has over 1000 keys. They need a special key for every pictograph. It's a very primitive system rooted in the Neolithic era.
The TOP500 list is interesting, but people treating it like a "race" for the fastest machine is kind of silly.
It used to be whomever could come up with the most optimal architecture would have the fastest computer. You had exotic CPUs running in custom hyper-ring or torus buses.
Nowadays it's whomever throws the most amount of money at buying the newest and, generally, commodity hardware. There are different flavors of custom Linux micro-oses they run. There are different interconnects, though they are almost all off-the-shelf (GigE, Infiniband, Myrinet...) The last real innovation was China's last big machine that ran home-brew, probably Alpha-derived CPUs, but even then they managed to hit the top spot by using over 40,000 260-core processors in their system.
It's less of a barometer of innovation, rather than a metric of how much money someone is willing to spend.
> MAGA!
Yeah, right.
While the US may have the top performing supercomputer for the moment, the Chinese are probably doing something useful with theirs. And I mean useful, such as keeping data centers from getting too cold.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Idea:
1. Take two clusters.
2. Rename them such that they are now a single "super computer".
3. Be the winnars on the Top500 list!
4. Profit!
That business model should be patented!
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Even though #1 & #2 on the TOP500 are NVIDIA based. And NVIDIA DGX-1 lets anyone join TOP500 by buying a few dozens boxes and networking them together (see #50 and #51)
The first thing through my head was, does it matter how fast it is if you don't know how to use it, the second was that comes with terrible innuendo...
Regardless, what are really being done with the computers of value? Is the fastest supercomputer really adding the most value to the world?
MAGA!
US only overtook China because they stole China's IP.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
We're talking about the list of *known* supercomputers. I'm sure various government agencies have supercomputers that are secret. In fact, it's highly probable that the most powerful in the world are not public knowledge.
Better known as 318230.
With supercomputing, often #1 on the list is more powerful than the next 20 combined. It's important for the US to remain #1.
Absolutely. Now that we have the #1 supercomputer on this list, we can supercompute more computer stuff than the next 20 supercomputers on the list can supercompute their stuff.
I guess what I'm saying is, I don't actually give a shit about this list, or whatever it is they are doing with these computers, because I strongly suspect none of it benefits me in any way and is likely to be something I detest.
Yeah, might be something completely horrible like genetic cancer analysis of the type that led to cancer immunotherapy (OK, so this is a bit of an assumption about how these treatments came about and I'm ignoring research for killing people too). Regardless, it isn't the research but the application that could be a problem.
"Super computers are mostly useless" gets a score of 2?
Logged in users with positive enough karma get a default 2 to start all posts. There have been no other mods to the GP post as of this post.
Super computing isn't like it use to be. (not to discredit all the hard work to the designers of these new computers, as my statement is oversimplifying things) To be on Top for Supercomputer Today it is more of an issue of being able to put more money into the problem then putting more creativity into it.
The old cray systems for example, when they were #1 on the super computing place, was very creative on how they achieved max performance on a relativity small form factor. Today's supercomputers are in essence just a bunch of server blades, with high speed network crammed in as big of a room that you can afford to hold and cool.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
and India will beat us out, then it will be ..... rinse and repeat.
MAGA!
Just curious, where you the same happy when in 2012 Titan, Sequoia and Mira topped Chinese supercomputer?
Now the hard truth: in 2015 US had 199 vs China's 109 supercomputers on top500, today: US has 124 vs China 206: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Lastly, honestly, do you know what the phrase "the cult of a supreme leader" means and where it usually leads?
Basically you can simulate weather, nuclear bombs and a few other things, but that is it.
Right. And in silico drug design and functional materials design do not exist. Those rotor blades and aeroplane wings also just simulate themselves.
Every end has half a stick.
Imagine a Beowulf..... ah, fuck it. I'm too old for this crap.
Those rotor blades and aeroplane wings also just simulate themselves.
Well their parents better tell them to knock it off, I hear it will make you go blind.