Chinese petaflop computer

Started by arpad, November 01, 2011, 06:34:06 AM

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arpad

The Chinese have announced the completion of a one petaflop supercomputer. The Sunway BlueLight MPP - link - uses 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 processors designed and manufactured in China.

Now, before the usual suspects start predicting that this is another sign of the coming Chinese Century it ought to be known that this computer is about fifteenth on the international list of supercomputers and that the processors used to build the computer are two generations behind the current state of the art. China has other computers on the Top500 list - link - but they all use processors of American design/manufacture.

And it should be noted that the Top500 list is in constant turmoil with new "number ones" being posted all the time so getting on the Top500 list is a distinctly transient distinction.

Just to save anyone who's read this far some time, a "flop" in this context stands for "floating point operation" a standard measure of computer performance. A petaflop is a quadrillion flops. The time measure is "per second".

By way of comparison, an Intel Core i7 X 980 - pretty hot stuff for a desktop - clocks out at around 20 gigaflops, twenty billion floating point operations per second. That's 1,000,000,000,000,000 versus 20,000,000,000.

The reason the Chinese announcement doesn't necessarily mean all that much is that the brute force approach means only that the Chinese are willing to put together enough in the way of older processors to get on the list. It doesn't mean they're actually competitive in the supercomputer race. Not yet, anyway.

Solar


LOL, they're launching a super tanker powered by a souped up VW engine.
Sounds impressive..
The Chinese are noted for this kind of thing, in fact commies are noted for this kind of thing.
Russia was always copying our technology to no avail, but it looked impressive.
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Dan

I think some old dude in a back office somewhere thinks it makes for good press.
If you believe big government is the solution then you are a liberal. If you believe big government is the problem then you are a conservative.

arpad

It comes across to me as maybe a typical stunt by communists in that they've got to have the biggest this or the largest that without much regard to the actual utility of whatever it is.

The Soviet Union had the biggest truck plant in the world and it turned out that even with something is big and complex as a truck it's possible to build a truck factory that's just too large to be practical. But if you don't have to worry about making it pay and there's no one to tell you "no" then you go ahead and build a impractical, uneconomic truck factory just so you can have bragging rights to the biggest.

The reason I put "maybe" in that first sentence is that supercomputer development is on-going. Last year's bright idea is this years bust so it's not necessarily true that this is one of those typically communist "bigger is better" propaganda stunts. There may be a worthwhile point to this other then the building of an "all Chinese" supercomputer. Maybe.

And maybe not.

arpad

A little bit of perspective in an article from Wired about the Chinese announcement - link

Bottom line? The Japanese have the top spot with the "K Computer". It's made of individual processors designed specifically for the construction of a massively-parallel processor (MPP) and clocks out at 10 petaflops. That's this year. Next year the title will probably return to the U.S. since both IBM and Cray have announced they'll be putting the finishing touches on 20 petaflop machines.

The first exaflop computer, a thousand times as powerful as the Chinese computer, is looking to show up some time around 2017 or 2018.

Dan

Quote from: arpad on November 02, 2011, 08:21:35 PM
It comes across to me as maybe a typical stunt by communists in that they've got to have the biggest this or the largest that without much regard to the actual utility of whatever it is.

This is where we insert the obligatory phallus or Freud references.  :))
If you believe big government is the solution then you are a liberal. If you believe big government is the problem then you are a conservative.

arpad

I suppose that's inevitable but there's no getting around the fact that while bigger may not be better it's always impressive.

The other thing is that the computer's an "all Chinese" product. That's means it's not just among the world's biggest it's among the world's biggest as a product of China.

Dan

I still can't get the picture out of my head of the guy from the enzyte commercials as the Chinese propoganda minister. Smiling Bob.
If you believe big government is the solution then you are a liberal. If you believe big government is the problem then you are a conservative.