News Industry Expert: China May Be Unmatched in Supercomputer Abilities

[Admin]

TOP500 Co-Founder Jack Dongarra recently commented on the sensitive geopolitical environment around the supercomputer listing and benchmarking organisation, drawing attention to potential missing data.

Industry Expert: China May Be Unmatched in Supercomputer Abilities : Read more

 

[weber462]

support BOINC. The people's Supercomputer.

 

[Co BIY]

TOP500 Co-Founder Jack Dongarra recently commented on the sensitive geopolitical environment around the supercomputer listing and benchmarking organisation, drawing attention to potential missing data.

This great summary seems to have been lost in the article.


I think and worry more about intention than capability. No one is alarmed at the Finnish entry at the top of the chart.

I doubt that the unlisted computers were built to run climate models for future sustainability.

 

[The Historical Fidelity]

This great summary seems to have been lost in the article.


I think and worry more about intention than capability. No one is alarmed at the Finnish entry at the top of the chart.

I doubt that the unlisted computers were built to run climate models for future sustainability.

The problem with this article is If China truly had this third supercomputer capability, we would be seeing it all over the news as proof that China can overcome western sanctions and maintain competitiveness just like with the Huawei Mate 60.

 

[PaulAlcorn]

The problem with this article is If China truly had this third supercomputer capability, we would be seeing it all over the news as proof that China can overcome western sanctions and maintain competitiveness just like with the Huawei Mate 60.

The article explains why that probably wouldn't happen.

 

[The Historical Fidelity]

The article explains why that probably wouldn't happen.

Agree to disagree

 

[bit_user]

support BOINC. The people's Supercomputer.

It only works for certain kinds of tasks that involve very little communication between compute nodes, not a large amount of input data, and can be broken up into fairly small parcels of work. For everything else, you need a real supercomputer.

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As for China's new ExaFLOPS-scale supercomputer, I think it's not too hard to compensate for being about 1 node behind, when you have essentially unlimited resources to throw at the problem. 2 nodes or more... that's where things will get interesting.

Either way, you can be pretty sure they're not going to be winning any efficiency records on these things.

 

[Co BIY]

As for China's new ExaFLOPS-scale supercomputer, I think it's not too hard to compensate for being about 1 node behind, when you have essentially unlimited resources to throw at the problem. 2 nodes or more... that's where things will get interesting.

Either way, you can be pretty sure they're not going to be winning any efficiency records on these things.

America put people on the moon, built an enormous nuclear-tipped ballistic missile force and created the internet with computers less powerful than the ones a Foxconn janitor has in his pocket. I don't think being limited to a 7nm process will hold them back too much.

China is permitting two new coal-fired power plants a week and 22 nuclear power plants under construction. I don't think the energy efficiency angle will give them much pause.

 

[bit_user]

America put people on the moon, built an enormous nuclear-tipped ballistic missile force and created the internet with computers less powerful than the ones a Foxconn janitor has in his pocket.

That has nothing to do with anything. A lot of the problems we haven't solved require vast amounts of compute power, which usually has something to do with why we haven't solved them.

China is permitting two new coal-fired power plants a week and 22 nuclear power plants under construction. I don't think the energy efficiency angle will give them much pause.

They're adding so much energy-generation, in large part, because they have a large population. The central government actually tried to stop the build-out of coal-fired power generation, a few years ago, but lost a legal battle and had to relent.

Oh, and another thing that happened, recently, is the Yangtze River dried up in a historic drought, which was a major source of power generation:

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China drought causes Yangtze to dry up, sparking shortage of hydropower

Nationwide alert issued with south-west especially badly hit, as major companies forced to suspend work

www.theguardian.com

​

I'm sure some of the new capacity is to backstop a recurrence of that. During a heat wave is usually when energy consumption is peaking, too. It was so bad that they had to temporarily shut down factories in the region.

Anyway, I basically agree that they can & will build whatever amount of power generation capacity needed to run their supercomputers and datacenters, which is part of what worries me. However, I do think you face some scaling challenges as supercomputers grow physically larger. So, it's not a simple "numbers game" where you can necessarily make up in quantity what your nodes lack in width and speed.