US Overtakes China in Top Supercomputer List (bbc.com) 74
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.
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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.
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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 es
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MAGA!
US only overtook China because they stole China's IP.
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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/... [wikipedia.org]
Lastly, honestly, do you know what the phrase "the cult of a supreme leader" means and where it usually leads?
Much more interesting... (Score:1)
... 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.
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One interesting item with the POWER9 is Turbo Core mode. This disables have the CPUs, but lets the remaining ones use the disabled CPUs' caches, and allows the clock speed on the chip to be increased by a significant amount. The main reason this is done is because of certain DB vendors licensing by CPU, and because the computer reports half the cores, it saves a lot of money. Ironically, the performance loss from the halving of the cores is not as bad as one would expect.
The difference (Score:1)
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.
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That is why a Chinese keyboard has over 1000 keys.
China uses standard QWERTY keyboards. They enter hanzi using Pinyin [wikipedia.org], a phonetic script using the Latin alphabet.
Keyboards with over a thousand keys were made decades ago, but they were for manual typing (keystroke directly to paper), and nobody uses them anymore. I have only seen them in museums.
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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.
Race (Score:1)
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 almos
Re:*sigh* Its still _clusters_! (Score:4, Informative)
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!
NVDA falls 8% (Score:1)
Even though #1 [top500.org] & #2 [top500.org] 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 [top500.org] and #51 [top500.org])
How you use it? (Score:3)
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?
Of the supercomputers we know of (Score:3)
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.
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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.
Yes, absolutely. The Top-500 doesn't include systems from NSA and other US/non-US governmental agencies; corporate systems such as for oil exploration, etc.; or even some academic systems such as Blue Waters at UIUC.
The Top-500 list is mainly for governmental bragging rights, as even the non-government owned machines are largely government funded. However, this list does help to push forward the research for tackling the big problems of scalable cost, performance, power, reliability, and programmability.
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Supercomputers are mostly useless (Score:1)
Basically you can simulate weather, nuclear bombs and a few other things, but that is it.
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"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.
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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.
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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.
Give it a week... (Score:2)
and India will beat us out, then it will be ..... rinse and repeat.
World's fastest Supercomputer (Score:1)