NSA, DOE Say China's Supercomputing Advances Put US At Risk (computerworld.com) 130
dcblogs quotes a report from Computerworld: Advanced computing experts at the National Security Agency and the Department of Energy are warning that China is "extremely likely" to take leadership in supercomputing as early as 2020, unless the U.S. acts quickly to increase spending. China's supercomputing advances are not only putting national security at risk, but also U.S. leadership in high-tech manufacturing. If China succeeds, it may "undermine profitable parts of the U.S. economy," according to a report titled U.S. Leadership in High Performance Computing by HPC technical experts at the NSA, the DOE, the National Science Foundation and other agencies. The report stems from a workshop held in September that was attended by 60 people, many scientists, 40 of whom work in government, with the balance representing industry and academia. "Meeting participants, especially those from industry, noted that it can be easy for Americans to draw the wrong conclusions about what HPC investments by China mean -- without considering China's motivations," the report states. "These participants stressed that their personal interactions with Chinese researchers and at supercomputing centers showed a mindset where computing is first and foremost a strategic capability for improving the country; for pulling a billion people out of poverty; for supporting companies that are looking to build better products, or bridges, or rail networks; for transitioning away from a role as a low-cost manufacturer for the world; for enabling the economy to move from 'Made in China' to 'Made by China.'"
So fix it for $diety sake (Score:5, Insightful)
Fucking Trump, trying to bring back manufacturing when he doesn't understand the concept of "robot".
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That wall is going to be tall and absolutely beautiful. Powerful. Secure, with underground sensors and towers with guards packing automatic weapons and night vision it'll be world class U! S! A! U! S! A! state of the art National Park tourist attraction for 2000 miles and worthy of the Donald J Trump logo in gold letters at the top. Bigger and BETTER than the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China.
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Indeed. China already took the lead in wall technology a few thousand years ago...
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Yeah! Make MEXICO pay for the supercomputing tech!
Actually we are by default making China pay for it. The downside of which is that we will have to beg for time on it on their terms.
Re:So fix it for $diety sake (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: So fix it for $diety sake (Score:1)
But it's the only thing we can think of to employ Americans. The private sector just doesn't employ as many people at good wages with benefits. It's pretty much the only way for many of us as our cities have had anything they were known for automated. You /. people love to blame the victim and tell them evolve or die, learn new skills but its not about any individual when entire cities have their economy ripped out. People coming up in this environment don't thrive unless they come from money, get a break o
Re: So fix it for $diety sake (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem in my view (as a non-american) with the military spending is that the military then has to be used to justify the gigantic cost of it. It creates a situation in which you pretty much have to be involved in perpetual conflicts because otherwise having 10 aircraft carrier groups, hundreds of bases outside the US and other tools designed to project insane amounts of force anywhere on the globe cannot be justified. Orwell had a point about this:
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If we cut back that far, the EU would shit itself and raise taxes 20% on their own people to make up for what the US has been spending on keeping the ever hungry Russia from taking back what they once owned.
I'd like to see that happen. Let countries pay for their own defense. Then the US can finally afford universal healthcare. Poland and Finland wont anymore, but why should we put their people above our own families?
I don't know why you call Poland on that. It's one of 5 countries that spend 2% or more of GDP on military [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO#Military_expenditures] (2% is what NATO states agreed for 11 years ago). Poland is also on the 5th place in military expenditures as % of GDP while having 8th population. Go whine about France or Germany if you must.
Re:So fix it for $diety sake (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Finn: fuck you. We are not, and have never been, in NATO. We already pay for our own defense, every cent of it. We have compulsory military service for all men due to the size difference between us (5,4 million) and Russia (140 million). If push comes to shove we can muster nearly a trained million men into arms.
The strategy of defense for us is not to compete with Russia in a direct conflict. But when you scatter 800 000 soldiers to the woods with guns and (modern) equipment hidden all around the vast countryside, it's going to make Afghanistan look like a a walk in the park. The Russians have around 30 000 troops that they can mobilize rapidly across the border. That's nowhere near enough to take us on. An invasion would require them to start moving large amounts of troops from elsewhere, something they have very limited capacity to do at the moment because of funds and the ongoing conflicts in both Ukraine and Syria.
Which is to say: while we cannot singlehandedly defeat Russia, we can make occupying this country so costly to them in terms of lives and resources that they will have to think hard whether or not the benefits outweigh the costs. That's been the corner stone of the Finnish Defense Forces ever since the 2nd world war and so far the Russians have not desired to test just how serious we are about maintaining our independence, probably because they have some bad memories from the way the Winter War went for them. [wordpress.com]
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Here is an official video demonstrating the awesome capabilities of the Finnish Defence Forces. Every finnish reservist is ready to defend our ice hockey players and swans, if the call comes!
https://youtu.be/FJvrY04r8io [youtu.be]
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So let's work a deal - they can outsource their defense needs to the US, and only raise their taxes by 10% to pay for it.
We'll happily keep a carrier battle group parked in the Mediterranean. The EU's GDP was around $16T in 2016, so the invoice for $1.6T is on it's way, payable Net 30.
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The kicker is, as you mentioned, the centralized planning. With a five-year plan--which can fluctuate to extreme degrees responding to acute problems--one can obfuscate earmarked spending and hide actual power structures holding up the government, hide failures/give the party momentum to spin those failures into neutrals or successes.
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Anyone who has that kind of money in China has "ties to leading families of the Communist Party" - that's how they got the fucking money, or at least got to keep it.
Well, duh. That's why they went into power in the first place, and continue to do so in most, if not all, countries. Even the west they throw out tidbits to the population, but behind closed doors, money changes hands (unofficially, or officially through donations) and this or that regulatory burden or law gets changed. That's why they go into power everywhere.
This worldview has yet to fail in its massive explanatory and predictive power.
Trump understands (Score:5, Insightful)
Fucking Trump, trying to bring back manufacturing when he doesn't understand the concept of "robot".
Perhaps, but I'm pretty sure he understands the concept of unemployment.
In your opinion, is supercomputing more important than bringing back jobs?
What's your stance on H1B then?
Re:Trump understands (Score:4, Insightful)
Supercomputing WILL bring back jobs! Far more so than manual labour that will be quickly automated away.
Supercomputing is how you develop new materials, new drugs, new high end manufacturing. All the good jobs are in services now, not labour that a machine could do if it were only very slightly cheaper than a human.
That's what the Chinese recognize and why they will overtake the US if things don't change. You can't hang on to the jobs of the past, you have to adapt and change with the times and invest in your future. China is absolutely brutal about advancement and putting the good of the country before individuals who want to keep living their same lifestyle. The US doesn't need to go that far, but it can't be too luddite about it either.
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Instead of billions on a stupid wall, invest billions in supercomputing tech. Hell, invest billions in semiconductor tech, cuz China is trying to take the lead in semiconductors big time.
Fucking Trump, trying to bring back manufacturing when he doesn't understand the concept of "robot".
I think it's too late to look at being ahead. The USA does not have exclusivity on intelligence, but the USA handicaps itself by having exhorbitantly high cost "for profit" universities. The pentium was designed in Israel, much of your supertech stuff is being done in Asia, or India or Israel.
The number of university grads in the states as a percentage of the population is 15 percent less than most of the industrialized world. Canada, per capitia, has 15% more grads than the USA. Its because we say "low c
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Assembled in China out of parts from all over the world.
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Nope - they've published video of the factory creating the trash can case and everything. They built a very expensive facility to do it.
It's a shame they aren't using it to make a computer that anyone actually wants to buy.
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Only the USA has the university graduates to design a real super computer with super computer ready CPU designs.
China is doing what contractors sold the NSA in the 1980's. A lot of desktop CPU's on a really fast network can do some super computer like work on a lot of data.
Great for the contractors selling a support service to the NSA.
An easy hardware solution for China to get fast results if the question can
Re:It's all made in China (Score:5, Insightful)
China is taking a lot of very slow consumer chips and making a fast networked computer system.
That's not right. It's not even wrong.
You don't seem to understand what modern supercomputers are, what China are doing or what the hard bit is.
The Tianhe-2 (current #2) uses Xeon and Xeon Phi chips like many of the other top 500. Xeon Phi is the Xeon equivalent of a GPU which is more or less a large bunch of rather slow, FP heavy cores connected on die with a good interconnect. They couple the whole show together with their own custom interconnect, which is one of the hard bits. Intel spent $125 million to buy a previous generation interconnect from Cray, because that was easier than rolling their own.
But anyway the Tianhe-2 is like many (the majority) on the top 500, COTS CPUs, COTS coprocessor cards and some sort of cool interconnect.
And then there's Sunway TaihuLight, the current #1. That's another ball of wax. That's a bit more like the K-computer (#7) which has a large number of custom CPU dies with relatively low clocking, high floating point density cores with a networking interconnect right there on the die for extra low latency. The Sunway CPUs are a bit like the Cell in archiecture. Either way, they've got a huge amount of floating point grunt and are not remotely consumer chips.
Only the USA has the university graduates to design a real super computer with super computer ready CPU designs.
Actual verifiable facts disagree with you. The #1 position is a custom design made in China. The former #1 (now #7) is a custom design made in Japan, and has the best peak to max ratio on the list.
The US currently dominates the list, but is not the only player. Your claim is nothing but mindless jingoism fuelled by an ignorance of how supercomputers work.
A fast network of consumer cpu's is not a real supercomputer anymore.
A very fast, low latency network of CPUs is the *only* thing a supercomputer is anymore.
With a new ranking standard the USA is number one again.
Right so if y'all simply define yourselves to be #1, then youre #1. What does that achive?
unless the U.S. acts quickly to increase spending (Score:2)
To Quote The Late Buck Turgidson: (Score:3)
Or quit slurping our data.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Out here in the real world, we're about done writing blank checks for "national security" and "them terrists". No one would ever notice if you cut your mission in half.
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Evidently not, given that the US President is pushing for a massive _increase_ in defense spending.
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Who is he talking about? Who's "us"?
Well, since it's the NSA and DOE saying this, I'd guess us=U.S.
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The US collect it all policy resulted in data that needed to be sorted. A huge new network of desktop CPU's packaged to look like a classic super computer was a great idea to win a long term contract with.
The hardware was cheap, the new network support needed was expensive. Win, win for a private sector contractor.
The other emerging issue for the NSA is Australia, Canada and the GCHQ can buy the same met
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The revolution for the NSA contractor was to offer the NSA desktop computer CPU's on a fast network
Stop banging that drum: it's just not true. I think the last single CPU supercomputer was the Cray 1. Even Cray himself who rather disliked multiple CPUs (would you rather have 1024 chickens or a strong ox) had to put 8 in the Cray-2.
From then the number only went up. Even Mr Cray started going the massive parallelism route before he died. The problem is that you can't cram the power dissipitation or memory ba
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I was thinking more of what the NSA learned around the Project THOTH decade, 1984-88.
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That's often the case, but not always. In some applications you have a deadline -- or a deadline/precision trade off (e.g. weather prediction).
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I don't know of any such applications that would be best described as a national security issue.
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I don't know of any such applications that would be best described as a national security issue.
I certainly can, although I don't know whether they're what the author has in mind. The two applications that come immediately to mind are naval: high precision weather forecasting; and submarine identification from sensor data.
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I don't know of any such applications that would be best described as a national security issue.
One of the biggest government uses for super computers is modeling nuclear weapons. These models are used to create smaller, more powerful warheads and in the absence of actual tests (due to treaty bans) these are how we now maintain and upgrade our nuclear stockpile. Since the DOE is mentioned in the article, I'd imagine that is the national security issue they are concerned with.
Fear mongers (Score:1)
"We have to spend more money on this project or we will all die"
if your strength relies on the weakness of others (Score:4, Interesting)
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Except it's not abou
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You seem to have mistaken me for one of the people in the article. I was merely explaining to article to someone who had misunderstood it (actually, a apparently a number of people who had misunderstood it--seeing as the mistaken comment was highly rated).
I have not done my own analysis of Chinese vs. US capabilities, and even if I had it wouldn't have been based on whatever these people supposedly saw at the confer
At risk? (Score:5, Insightful)
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millions of raspberry pi (Score:1)
Inside Trump's mind (Score:2)
2020? How about 2016 (Score:3, Informative)
China builds worldâ(TM)s fastest supercomputer without U.S. chips [computerworld.com]
Chinaâ(TM)s New Supercomputer Puts the US Even Further Behind [wired.com]
The next one is going to be 10 times as fast:
Tianhe-3 will be 10 times faster than the current fastest supercomputer in the world, the Sunway TaihuLight [dw.com]
Re: 2020? How about 2016 (Score:1)
Shhh, dont rock the boat. At least let Trump finish building the wall to keep the Americans in before telling them how much better the rest of the world is.
Not gonna happen (Score:2)
All non-military, non-entitlement budget entries are going to be dramatically slashed in the current president's upcoming budget.
Ploy to fund boondoggle HPC projects (Score:1)
"HPC leadership" by itself is pointless. China owning big computers doesn't put the USA at risk. It's what they do with them that matters, and whatever *that* is, you likely won't neutralize it just by building even bigger computers in the USA.
These HPC people are also glossing over the issue that for most important problems, parallelizing over commodity CPUs connected by commodity networks (i.e. the cloud) is far more cost-effective than the "big iron" shared-memory HPC systems, and via Google, Amazon and
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These HPC people are also glossing over the issue that for most important problems, parallelizing over commodity CPUs connected by commodity networks (i.e. the cloud) is far more cost-effective than the "big iron" shared-memory HPC systems,
Nope there's a ton inaccurate about that. Firstly, supercomputers haven't been shared memory for decades. They're built with commodity (usually) CPUs with phenomenally expensive interconnect hardware. Sometimes expensive off the shelf, sometimes proprietary. Occasionall
Where's the risk? (Score:2)
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Go suck a crocodile cock, spamhole.
"Build better bridges" (Score:3)
"Build better bridges".
Not really. The better we've become at engineering, the more we cut the bridge designs from "massively overbuilt, in such a way as to endure they never fall apart" to replace them with "barely overbuilt, in such a way as the first storm slightly out of the overage tolerance we've allowed will cause everything to be destroyed".
Seems stupid.
Rather than trying to figure out how to cut our tolerances as close to the bone as possible, we should probably go back to massively overbuilding things -- and then use our knowledge of tolerances to *ensure* they are massively overbuilt.
If we did that, we wouldn't have things like the 2007 I-35W bridge collapse happening. The bridges might sink into the ground under their own weight, but they wouldn't be collapsing.
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The flip side of that coin is that if you overbuild the bridges, you may only be able to afford to fix half of them.
The flip side of that is that there are Roman aqueducts still in service, because the Romans overbuilt as well. So you won't *need* to fix the other half of them.
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I'm pretty sure the Romans thought their empire was going to last forever, and built based on that eventuality.
So what you're arguing is that the Romans would have build just as ephemerally as we do, even though they didn't expect to be ephemeral, had slaves, and didn't have labor unions that needed make-work contracts to keep the workers happy.
By "selection bias", you are referring to the Romans killing engineers and architects who built things that fell down, leaving only non-dead engineers and architects
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Duh... (Score:1)
Chickens, meet roost (Score:2)
Not surprisingly, hundreds of thousands of highly educated people decided to go home with their training after their individual H1-B indentures expired and compete with their old bosses
With EVERY product being offshored, the design work of man-millennia has become Chinese property
Thank you very much Capitalists, for making America wilt
The next generation of 'enemies' will now have superior tech to ours...and will win wars, unli
Outsourcing (Score:1)
Just tell Trump (Score:2)
Tell him that you need all these new supercomputers to make his tweets the bestest, and most read. If that doesn't get you a $10B or so then nothing will.