News on China's scientific and technological development.

Blackstone said:

Supercomputing in 2017 will be an interesting year. Japan is working on a 30petaflops faster machine and US is working on one more than twice as fast (200-250 petaflops). The race is on.

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Without the "eye-ball baiting" title, the article would have been an ordinary and valuable report of development. But then the author just want to ruin it by making it sound like a "dick measuring" contest.
Why does he always like beating someone? In his logic, China has been beating everyone for years? He is more of a fear-mongering figure than a scientific figure.

The fact that every country will keep developing further their computer and technology before and after today means that all these future computers are in the pipeline regardless if China is at the top today.

taxiya said:

Without the "eye-ball baiting" title, the article would have been an ordinary and valuable report of development. But then the author just want to ruin it by making it sound like a "dick measuring" contest.
Why does he always like beating someone? In his logic, China has been beating everyone for years? He is more of a fear-mongering figure than a scientific figure.

The fact that every country will keep developing further their computer and technology before and after today means that all these future computers are in the pipeline regardless if China is at the top today.

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LOL "China's Exascale Democracy Slayer to come online in 2018" hahaha

manqiangrexue said:

LOL "China's Exascale Democracy Slayer to come online in 2018" hahaha

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I can imagine who will be the author of that article.

manqiangrexue said:

Interesting article! However, the first paragraph says that the system is due for completion next year while the 5th paragraph says that bidding to build such a system has not yet concluded (will conclude 12/08). That sounds a little weird. Anyway, Sierra and Summit (America's 2 supercomputers) are due in 2018. We'll see if China has made any progress by then. I'm personally hoping that their exascale computer could be online within 2 years.They've already started construction.

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One comes across opinion pieces that the She Wei CPU’s and the FeiTeng CPUs are still behind anything being worked on by Intel IBM Fujitsu Nvidia etc. If that’s the case would’nt it slow China’s Exascale ambitions?.

B.I.B. said:

One comes across opinion pieces that the She Wei CPU’s and the FeiTeng CPUs are still behind anything being worked on by Intel IBM Fujitsu Nvidia etc. If that’s the case would’nt it slow China’s Exascale ambitions?.

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If that is the case (I don't debate about that claim), how could Sunway TaihuLight managed to sit on the top seat twice so far? While the other ones based on superior CPUs failed?

Therefor, my answer is that the (Chinese) solution is a system one rather than one of raw CPU power.

I also heard that Chinese rely and go to the MIPS path than others. So the comparison with the rest mentioned above may not be relevant because the system built on different CPU architecture would have different solutions.

B.I.B. said:

One comes across opinion pieces that the She Wei CPU’s and the FeiTeng CPUs are still behind anything being worked on by Intel IBM Fujitsu Nvidia etc. If that’s the case would’nt it slow China’s Exascale ambitions?.

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You could brute force only so much, and at some point physics imposes itself on the less technologically sophisticated and capable CPU.

Blackstone said:

You could brute force only so much, and at some point physics imposes itself on the less technologically sophisticated and capable CPU.

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Are you sure about the definition of "brute forcing"?

In my early years of study in Computer Engineering, we had an experiment of breaking the windows password data file by brute forcing. Brute forcing in our world is to try every combination of password on that file until we got the right one. It took days to get it on a 386 CPU machine. Brute forcing relies on raw CPU power. That is how we define it, apparently different from yours.

In this case, the Chinese CPUs are less powerful than Intel CPUs per CPU core. The fact that Sunway TaihuLight sit on the top beating all other machines based on Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU including China's own Tianhe 2 says that Sunway TaihuLight is exactly opposite to brute forcing, that is smarter in system solution. The ones who try to overtake it by relying on more powerful CPUs are actually brute forcing.

So the fact is that, it is your proposal of relying more on sophisticated CPUs being brute forcing and will hit the wall of physics before the Chinese approach based on less sophisticated CPUs. And that gap of sophistication of CPUs is closing fast.

Blackstone said:

You could brute force only so much, and at some point physics imposes itself on the less technologically sophisticated and capable CPU.

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Very very correct, which is why Titan can no longer advance its capabilities simply by adding more, though it is already twice the size of Taihulight, though only 20% as capable and 40% as energy-efficient. Given that, I think there are no illusions here that China is the one who simply wants to add more and more inferior tech to make an immediately powerful but ultimately limited machine.

Members would do well to take heed:

Critique intelligently, with a big dose of common sense. And don't abuse the leeway allowed.

There is a gimick in the fastest claim. The Sunway TaihuLight CPUs doesn't communicate with one another as fast as the Japan's K supercomputer. That is the reason why K is at top of ratings with less CPU cores while the Sunway TaihuLight that has 15 time more CPU can't out do K in Graph500.
It has to do as wiki explains, in which K is able to move more data at one time through parallel computing. This is required for real time weather prediction and/or process big data collected through all the sensors that is accumulating at an alarming rate.
At the end it all boils down to the architecture of the super computer's design.