Summary: The Apollo program demonstrated America’s superpower status in the 1960’s. Today’s contests are more diffuse, such as the race to build the most and largest supercomputers. China has moved into the lead in this, another milestone in its quest to again become the Middle Kingdom. Helping in their quest is America’s unwillingness to invest in itself, preferring to fund the 1%, a massive military, and foreign wars.
“China’s New Supercomputer Puts the US Even Further Behind“
By Brian Barrett, Wired, 21 June 2016 — Excerpt.
“This week, China’s Sunway TaihuLight officially became the fastest supercomputer in the world. The previous champ? Also from China. What used to be an arms race for supercomputing primacy among technological nations has turned into a blowout.
“The Sunway TaihuLight is indeed a monster: theoretical peak performance of 125 petaflops, 10,649,600 cores, and 1.31 petabytes of primary memory. That’s not just “big.” Former Indiana Pacers center Rik Smits is big. This is, like, mountain big. Jupiter big.
“TaihuLight’s abilities are matched only by the ambition that drove its creation. Fifteen years ago, China claimed zero of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. Today, it not only has more than everyone else — including the US — but its best machine boasts speeds five times faster than the best the US can muster.
“…Its 10.6 million cores are more than three times the previous leader, China’s Tianhe-2, and nearly 20 times the fastest U.S. supercomputer, Titan, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. ‘It’s running very high rates of execution speed, very good efficiency, and very good power efficiency,’ says University of Tennessee computer scientist Jack Dongarra. ‘It’s really quite impressive.’ {Its peak power consumption under load (the HPL benchmark) is 15.37 MW, or 6 Gflops/Watt. It would have taken the #2 spot on the November 2015 Green500 list.}
“…TaihuLight is faster than anything scheduled to come online in the US until 2018, when three Department of Energy sites will each receive a machine expected to range from 150 to 200 petaflops. That’s ahead of where China is now — but two years is half an eternity in computer-time.
“…The other significant TaihuLight achievement stings US interests even more, because it’s political. China’s last champ, Tianhe-2, had Intel inside. But in February of 2015, the Department of Commerce, citing national security concerns — supercomputers excel at crunching metadata for the NSA and their foreign equivalents — banned the sale of Intel Xeon processor to Chinese supercomputer labs.
“Rather than slow the rate of Chinese supercomputer technology, the move appears to have had quite the opposite effect. ‘I believe the Chinese government put more research funding into the projects to develop and put in place indigenous processors,’ Dongarra says. ‘The result of that, in some sense, is this machine today.'”
—————————- End excerpt. —————————-
The operating system is a Linux-based Chinese system called Sunway Raise. Bloomberg gives more detail about this remarkable achievement by China.
“The machine is powered by a SW26010 processor designed by Shanghai High Performance IC Design Center, TOP500 said Monday. “It’s not based on an existing architecture. They built it themselves,” said Jack Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee and creator of the measurement method used by TOP500. “This is a system that has Chinese processors.” Previous supercomputer winners have had processors built on U.S. technology…
“This is the first time that the Chinese have more systems than the U.S., so that, I think, is a striking accomplishment,” said Dongarra. The Chinese had no machines in the 2001 list, he noted. In the latest, China has 167 entries compared with 165 for the U.S.
A video tour of the TaihuLight supercomputer
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What’s next for America? 200 petaflops in 2018!
“Oak Ridge National Lab’s (ORNL) Summit supercomputer, one of the three pre-exascale systems being developed for the Department of Energy under its CORAL program, will hit 200 petaflops when it becomes operational in two years.
“…In a Congressional Budget Request from the DOE dated February 2016, the agency put forth an FY2017 funding request for site preparation for Summit at ORNL, as well as installation and operation of the smaller 8.5-petaflop Theta supercomputer to be deployed at Argonne National Lab this year. In the request, the 200-petaflop figure is called out …
“This money for Summit’s and Aurora’s {the 2018-19 predecessor} site preparation is not allocated yet, nor is the money for their actual installations, which presumably will be part of the FY18 budget request. So all of this might turn out to be wishful thinking, and given Congress’s recent performance, it surely could. But that’s the plan as it stands today.”
— From the TOP500 website, 27 June 2016. Red emphasis added.
What’s next for China? 1,000 petaflops by 2020.
“A supercomputer capable of at least a billion billion calculations per second {one thousand petaflops} will enter service by 2020, head of the school of computing at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) said on June 15. According to the national plan for the next generation of high performance computers, China will develop an exascale computer during the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020).
“’The government of Tianjin Binhai New Area, NUDT and the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin are working on the project, and we plan to name it Tianhe-3,’ said Liao Xiangke, the school head”.
— From The State Council of China, 16 June 2016.
For More Information
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about China, about technology, and especially these…
- Will China become a superpower?
- How China builds its commercial empire.
- Does corruption limit China’s growth, or pose a threat to its existence?
- A China briefing from one of the West’s best-connected experts.
- George Magnus: China’s leaders must choose: political power for them, or economic growth for China.
- Stratfor: What Kind of Great Power Will China Become?
- Important: Watch other nations build infrastructure for 21st C prosperity. We can, too.
where do we stand on quantum computing?
Pete,
Good question. Please google it and report back!
Ah google.
There is a Canadian company called D-Wave systems, involved with Google and Lockheed, which commercialized a 1000-qubit system in 2015, using superconductors. Qubits have been made in other ways, but superconductors have the promise of developing into a technology that can be mass produced using semiconductor fabrication technology, and eventually operated with “reasonable” cooling requirements. See also: graphene. A 1000-qubit system could in theory do some remarkably heavy computation. Obvious application is code breaking, but there is so much more. Surprisingly little press about it.
Also apparently the Chinese Quantum Experiments Space Satellite (QUESS) is due to launch next month, to explore/develop quantum teleportation of photons, for communications purposes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_quantum_computing
super trivia: starting early 80s, we were working with director of NSF and were suppose to get $20M to interconnect the NSF supercomputer centers, then congress cuts the budget, some number of other things happen and finally they release an RFP (in part based on what we already had running). Internal politics prevent us from bidding and the director of NSF tries to help by writing the company a letter with support from other agencies (but that just makes the internal politics worse, as does comments that what we already had running was at least 5yrs ahead of all bid responses). As regional networks connect into the centers, it becomes the NSFNET backbone, precursor to the modern internet. some old email from the period.
In the late 80s & early 90s we where doing HA/CMP and were working on cluster scaleup with national labs for technical/scientific and RDBMS vendors for commercial. This is reference to Jan1992 meeting in Ellison’s on cluster scaleup for Oracle RDBMS
within a few weeks of that meeting, the scaleup work was transferred, announced as IBM supercomputer (for technical and scientific *ONLY*), and we were told we couldn’t work on anything with more than four processors (part of it was the mainframe RDBMS group complained that if I was allowed to go ahead, it would be at least 5yrs ahead of them). Press article, 17Feb1992, for “scientific and technical *ONLY*”:
press from 11May1992, “caught by surprise” in national lab interest in cluster supercomputers. old email from the period. other trivia: I had first gotten involved with LLNL on large cluster computing back in 1979.
Modern generation of supercomputers use large number of advanced processors … many of them are the same that are used in signal processing that are critical in applications like radar, sonar, guidance, etc. Presumably this is why in spring of 2015, DOD put these processors on export control (China had previously built largest supercomputer in the world using processors from the US). At fall 2015 supercomputer conference, China demonstrated that they had started producing their own advanced processors. Recently, China demonstrated they had started producing these processors in quantity with even larger, largest supercomputer in the world.
President Clinton announces: “‘Bridge To 21st Century’ Crap Forgotten ”
Offering a bold new vision for post-1996 presidential election America, President Clinton unveiled a new plan Monday to forget about that “Bridge To The 21st Century” crap.
“My fellow Americans, he time has come for all of us to erase all that bullshit from our minds. I am fully confident that if we all work together, by the end of the week we can forget I ever said that crap. While those stirring words appeared to come from my heart,” Clinton added, “they in fact originated from my ass.”
The phrase “Bridge To The 21st Century,” used widely during last fall’s presidential election and this January’s inauguration, was the result of exhaustive White House test-market research. Thousands of phone surveys were conducted in which randomly selected Americans were asked to rate three phrases—”Bridge To The 21st Century”; “Footpath To The Future”; and “Trail To Tomorrow”—according to a number of criteria, including vision, inspirational power and ease of memorization.
As part of his new plan, Clinton said he will create a committee whose purpose is “to develop special new bullshit that will, in its turn, eventually be forgotten as well.”
… “I do not know what my speechwriters will have me say in the future,” Clinton said. “But whatever it is, it is up to all of us as Americans to embrace it, and leave all that other crap from before behind.”
— From America’s one true news sources, The Onion. Published on 27 March 1997, but could as easily be today.
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