China stopped entering super computer listing because of you know who.
News on China's scientific and technological development.
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China stopped entering super computer listing because of you know who.
"When we first got word of benchmark results reaching exascale back in April (the benchmark results came in in March, just before trade restrictions cracked down on those exascale facilities and vendors, incidentally)"
from this earlier article:
Plutonium, son!
or a lot of ultra clean energy.
China has completed construction of its first industrial system of the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) after 27 years of work, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced on Thursday.
The BDS, built and operated solely by China, provides all-time, all-weather and high-accuracy positioning, navigation and timing services to global users.
So far, China has 45 BeiDou satellites in orbit and the scale of its BDS industrial system had exceeded 400 billion yuan ($62.92 billion) by the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020), according to the NDRC.
Breakthroughs in key technologies
Breakthroughs have been scored in key technologies to produce BeiDou chips and modules.
A system on a chip, known as SoC, is an integrated circuit which integrates all or most components of a computer or other electronic system. The SoC chips supporting the Beidou 3 signals have been widely used in the Internet of Things and consumer electronics fields.
BeiDou navigation and positioning chips, which support dual-frequency and dual-mode, have completed the verification of key performance and are now being mass produced.
By the end of 2021, the total number of terminal products with the BeiDou positioning service had exceeded one billion.
A BeiDou communication terminal is seen at Hongjianshan Weather Station in Longyan City of southeast China's Fujian Province, November 20, 2016. /CFP
Comprehensive industrial services, applications
The BDS has provided comprehensive services to the transportation, public security, emergency management, agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery industries, with integration into electricity, finance, communications and other infrastructure.
By the end of 2021, more than 7.9 million vehicles had been equipped with the BDS. Nearly 8,000 sets of BeiDou terminals of various types had been applied in the railway sector and more than 100,000 agricultural machines had been equipped with automatic driving systems based on the BDS.
Sales of domestic smartphones equipped with the BDS service reached 324 million in 2021, accounting for 94.5 percent of the total in China.
A technician uses test software to receive stable signals from 13 BeiDou satellites in Shanghai, China, June 25, 2020. /CFP
Future global service system
In the coming years, China will further develop public service platforms for BDS application research and development, testing, certification and licensing to optimize the BDS global service system.
In addition, the country will advance the BDS's short message and other features to establish a global public emergency service platform for emergency search and rescue as well as distress alarm, providing stable services for all users at home and abroad.
Beidou system high on agenda
By OUYANG SHIJIA | China Daily | Updated: 2022-04-07 09:04
China will take solid steps to boost high-quality development of its homegrown Beidou Navigation Satellite System during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), the country's top economic regulator said on Wednesday.
Having noticed that the total output value of China's satellite navigation and location services sector exceeded 400 billion yuan ($63 billion) by the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-20), the National Development and Reform Commission said it will actively work with relevant departments to improve supportive policies for Beidou's industrial development over the next few years.
The NDRC said it will make a big push to realize breakthroughs in several key technologies, build an innovation system involving leading enterprises, universities and research institutes and promote Beidou's application in fields including energy and transportation, natural resources, urban construction, ecological protection and mass consumption.
More efforts will also be made to encourage the private sector's participation in the research and development of Beidou applications and technologies, cultivate a group of leading enterprises and create a batch of globally competitive industrial clusters.
The BDS-independently constructed and operated by China-was officially commissioned by the country in 2020, opening the new BDS-3 system to global users. Since then, the BDS has been committed to providing global users with quality services.
The BDS can provide diverse services and powerful functions. Globally, the system can provide global positioning, navigation and timing, global messaging communication, and international search and rescue services. In the Asia-Pacific region, its services include regional short message communication, precise point positioning, satellite-based augmentation and ground-based augmentation.
So far, the BDS has been widely used in many public sectors and business fields at home and abroad.
According to the NDRC, shipments of smartphones supporting Beidou reached 324 million units in 2021, accounting for 94.5 percent of smartphone shipments within China.
As of the end of 2021, the Beidou system has been applied to over 7.9 million vehicles around China.
To promote the high-quality development of Beidou-related industries, the NDRC said it will study the formulation of laws and regulations on satellite navigation, accelerate the formulation and revision of standards for Beidou's application, introduce supportive policies for BDS services and increase credit support for BDS projects.
Citing the guidelines on the promotion and application of Beidou in mass consumption unveiled by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in January, Li Hongtao, an analyst at Pacific Securities, took a rosy view of Beidou's development in the next few years.
"With the development of Beidou applications and the rising number of Beidou users, a wide range of enterprises in related industries will benefit," Li said.
Chinese scientists set world record in quantum communication
By Yang Yang | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-04-13 15:45
Chinese scientists have set a world record for the longest quantum direct communication, Xinhua reported on Wednesday.
The realization of quantum secure direct communication over 100 km fiber with time-bin and phase quantum states by Chinese scientists is the world's longest distance for quantum direct communication.
The research result, 82 km longer than previous published longest quantum direct communication distance, was published on the latest version of Light-Science & Applications with great practical application significance.
Quantum direct communication can not only sense eavesdropping, but also prevent it so it is essential for confidentiality of message in modern communication.
The progress in study of quantum secure direct communication is important to improve the performances, such as the secure information rate and the communication distance, the research paper said.
In previous published research result the longest distance of quantum direct communication was 18 km, according to Xinhua.
中国科学家近日设计出一种相位量子态与时间戳量子态混合编码的量子直接通信新系统，成功实现100公里的量子直接通信。这是目前世界最长的量子直接通信距离。该研究成果由北京量子信息科学研究院、清华大学龙桂鲁教授团队和陆建华教授团队共同攻关，发表于最新一期《Light-Science & Applications》上.
Ultra-high-speed Lossless Networks for Exascale Computing Power
A major technical breakthrough by Huawei will ramp up the performance of computing and storage networks.By Li Xinyuan, Huawei
Huawei's R&D efforts have resulted in a breakthrough that has greatly improved the performance computing and storage networks: fully lossless Ethernet.
At Huawei Connect 2021, Wang Lei, President of the Data Center Network Domain of Huawei Data Communication Product Line, invited customer experts to discuss how Huawei's hyper-converged data center network can help improve supercomputing power and artificial intelligence. The experts also shared their insights into and visions for supercomputing applications.
In Liu Cixin's science-fiction novel The Three-Body Problem, "the world's most powerful computers," used to simulate nuclear explosions, "can perform 500 trillion floating-point operations per second." That seems like an incredibly huge number. However, on July 1, 2021, China's Pengcheng Cloud Brain II topped the IO500 ranking at the World Supercomputing Conference, exceeding one quintillion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), 2,000 times faster than the most powerful computers in The Three-Body Problem.
Real-world supercomputing has gone beyond the imaginings of science fiction.
Huawei Tech: We know that supercomputers have tremendous computing power. In layman’s terms, what does that mean?
Wang Lei: Exascale computing is truly powerful. Technically speaking, it is 1018 FLOPS, equivalent to what half a million of our latest laptops can do combined. AlphaGo, the AI that beat Lee Sedol at Go a few years ago, was powered by a petaflop-level [more than one quadrillion] FLOPS supercomputer. Today's exascale computers are 1,000 times as powerful as the computer that powered AlphaGo.
Huawei Tech: Is building a supercomputer simply a matter of stacking many computers together?
Customer 1: The consensus in the supercomputing world is that "1 + 1 < 2". For example, when we bind 100 computers together, do they deliver 100 times the computing power of a single computer? The answer is definitely no. For two connected computing units to work together, complex coordination is required, and the underlying condition is ensuring unimpeded communication between them. Lossless communication channels mean low latency and high efficiency for communications. Huawei's lossless network was developed to solve these kinds of communication problems.
Wang Lei: When we say "supercomputer", we are referring to a super computing cluster. It appears to be just a bunch of computing units clustered together, but the underlying super-fast network connecting them is what enables them to run at high speeds. Therefore, a supercomputer is not just a stack of regular computers, but an integrated system supported by an ultra-high-speed lossless network.
Customer 2: Both supercomputing centers and AI computing centers need high-speed networks and software to centrally manage physically scattered computers to form a logically unified computing cluster which serves as a computing resource pool that can be used on-demand.
Until now, supercomputing clusters that relied on Ethernet interconnect have always suffered from packet loss.
Huawei Tech: Ethernet is inherently prone to packet loss. What led Huawei to believe that it could solve a problem that has been around for 40 years? Has Huawei overcome this challenge?
Wang Lei: Huawei overcame this technical challenge two years ago. Back when we just started investment and research in computing, our researchers found that simply binding servers together could not create a linear increase in computing power. For example, they found that doubling the number of GPU servers increased computing power by just 4%. Through analyzing the computing process, we found that the problem was caused by packet loss, an inherent problem with conventional Ethernet. Packet loss of just 0.1% can result in computing power loss of 50%, meaning half the server computing power is wasted. To address this, Huawei began examining the question of how we might create lossless Ethernet networks. We finally solved this problem two years ago, thereby realizing 100% utilization of servers' computing power.
Huawei Tech: The digital economy is said to have entered the computing era. But will supercomputing have any impact on the daily lives of ordinary people?
Wang Lei: For most people, the whole topic of supercomputing seems like something very remote, because this technology is mainly used in relatively high-level applications such as weather forecasting, earthquake monitoring, and human genetic testing. However, supercomputing is much closer to our daily lives than most of us are aware of.
For example, in recent years, it’s played a role in increasing the variety of new, affordable cars. Vehicle crash testing is one of the most time- and investment-intensive processes in automobile manufacturing. Using physical vehicles for testing means each crash results in a scrapped testing vehicle, and the cost can add up to millions of RMB. However, using supercomputers to simulate crash tests can shorten the development cycle of new cars from 36 months to 12 months. Now, with Huawei's hyper-converged data center network, that process can be expedited even further.
Customer 1: We can look at supercomputing and its implications from the public health perspective. In the early days of the pandemic, we didn’t understand COVID-19 so well. Through extensive analysis, it was later found that the cytokine storm was an important factor increasing the morbidity rate. Supercomputing played a major role in the process of deepening our knowledge. Scientists and doctors working together found that the overreaction of the human immune system to the invading virus affected certain normal bodily functions and led to the failure of those functions. With the support of supercomputing, a way to cut off the cytokine storm signal pathways was discovered. This knowledge was put to good use in Wuhan, where it saved lives.
Customer 2: If we compare AI computing power to electric power, the AI computing center is like a large-scale power station. AI applications, like electricity, will be widely used in numerous industries and households. The use of AI will make urban management more precise – self-driving vehicles and license plate recognition are examples of AI in our daily lives and urban management.