News on China's scientific and technological development.

Hendrik_2000 said:

There is an article the other day that says that China has deployed all kind of software on their super computer . So that news that you quote is outdated.
China graduate about 7 million university graduate every year and engineering is still desirable profession in China unlike in the west where the best and brightest goes into law, medicine, wall street.

Ask Vincent he work in China at one time as software developer He know better than me

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People in the industry jokingly call themselves "IT 民工" (IT Farmer->Workers) because they are as numerous and lowly paid as the regular 民工 (Farmers that went into cities to work in factories and constructions)

That said, programming for supercomputers are different from regular coding because from what I understand the programs must be able to leverage the parallelism capability supercomputers typically use. It is not easy as shown in PC games. Multi-core mainstream PC CPUs have been out for years, yet most games can't leverage more than two or three cores.

SamuraiBlue said:

That is not be possible since the original license for the X86 chip is held by Intel. AMD is only utilizing the license through a cross agreement with Intel and is not able the provide license to a third party on their own.

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Either way, the new Donald Trump administration could find a way to pull the carpet under the feet if they wanted to.

Franklin said:

Does anyone know how well China is doing on the software front of these supercomputers. I remember reading a few years back that China can only utilize about 10% of their supercomputers capabilities because of software issue's.

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There was a report that the China's supercomputing software won an international award. It was posted here before.

Hendrik_2000 said:

There is an article the other day that says that China has deployed all kind of software on their super computer . So that news that you quote is outdated.
China graduate about 7 million university graduate every year and engineering is still desirable profession in China unlike in the west where the best and brightest goes into law, medicine, wall street.

Ask Vincent he work in China at one time as software developer He know better than me

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I have no doubt that Chinese top software developers are as good as the world class. Software developing is one of few areas that you don't need big hardware investment ... and experience is much less relevant in this industry

antiterror13 said:

I have no doubt that Chinese top software developers are as good as the world class. Software developing is one of few areas that you don't need big hardware investment ... and experience is much less relevant in this industry

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Uh no. Experience matter a lot. Writing good codes is hard, writing good, well architected codes is harder, and writing good, well architected, secured codes is the hardest.

On the topic of programming for supercomputers, one must be able to break one's problem into little pieces that can be processed at the same time. Think of password cracking using a "dictionary", a pre-computed set of passwords and their scrambled forms. If your computer's CPU has 8 cores, you can break the dictionary into 8 pieces, then get each of the cores to compared a scrambled password against one of the dictionaries. The amount if time to find the right one is 8 times faster

vincent said:

Uh no. Experience matter a lot. Writing good codes is hard, writing good, well architected codes is harder, and writing good, well architected, secured codes is the hardest.

On the topic of programming for supercomputers, one must be able to break one's problem into little pieces that can be processed at the same time. Think of password cracking using a "dictionary", a pre-computed set of passwords and their scrambled forms. If your computer's CPU has 8 cores, you can break the dictionary into 8 pieces, then get each of the cores to compared a scrambled password against one of the dictionaries. The amount if time to find the right one is 8 times faster

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I didn't say experience doesn't matter ... but less relevant as new technique and technology move that fast ..... did you notice that most programmers are young ?

With experience you potentially stuck with what you know and somewhat less interested to new techniques and technologies (than unexperience ones)

antiterror13 said:

I didn't say experience doesn't matter ... but less

relevant as new technique and technology move that fast ..... did you notice that most programmers are young ?

With experience you potentially stuck with what you know and somewhat less interested to new techniques and technologies (than unexperience ones)

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In the domain of software development, experience translates to greater mastery of the technology at hand, whatever that may be.

While it's true that new frameworks come out practically every year, companies cannot afford to keep updating their frameworks! They can try to adopt new technology, but they will have to do that based on the existing technology that they already use.

Think of technology in IT as tool sets. New tool sets come out all the time, but does that mean you need to keep changing your tools? Tools are only there to make the work easier, but *how* the work should be done is still up to the programmer/architect. New technology cannot replace a good understanding of software engineering principles, which definitely benefits from experience.

Another way to look at the importance of experience in IT: the most important resource in any software development company is its software developers. Good developers often make the difference between success and failure in startups. So what makes good developers? IT graduates are a dime a dozen. Good developers come from experience.

antiterror13 said:

I didn't say experience doesn't matter ... but less relevant as new technique and technology move that fast ..... did you notice that most programmers are young ?

With experience you potentially stuck with what you know and somewhat less interested to new techniques and technologies (than unexperience ones)

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Sounds like you don't work in software development. Thinking of building software as building a house. Material for houses may change over the years but the basic framework, design principles change much much more slowly. How the codes/components get put together is more or less the same regardless what technologies (c/c++/java/swift/ruby/python) you use. Writing a small piece of software may be very different when using different tech, but when you are developing a large solution you will need the experience to know how to put all the pieces together efficiently and securely

antiterror13 said:

did you notice that most programmers are young ?

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What vincent said in #3038 explains it very well why experience matters in writing computer software.

I'd also add that "most programmers are young" is because the software industry itself is young. Heck, even the computers were commercialized only about 50 or 60 years ago.

From my own experience, now there are definitely more grey hairs in this industry by the day.

SamuraiBlue said:

That is not be possible since the original license for the X86 chip is held by Intel. AMD is only utilizing the license through a cross agreement with Intel and is not able the provide license to a third party on their own.

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The Obama administration only banned Intel from selling Xenon chips to China, and not all chips based on Intel's x86 design, so it's still lawful for AMD to sell to China. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump administration lifts the ban, since it's stated purpose of impeding China supercomputer development wasn't successful.