Chinese supercomputer named as world's fastest
Ron Czapala
Posts: 2,418
http://news.yahoo.com/chinese-supercomputer-named-worlds-fastest-005600823.html
BEIJING (AP) A Chinese university has built the world's fastest supercomputer, almost doubling the speed of the U.S. machine that previously claimed the top spot and underlining China's rise as a science and technology powerhouse.
The semiannual TOP500 listing of the world's fastest supercomputers released Monday says the Tianhe-2 developed by the National University of Defense Technology in central China's Changsha city is capable of sustained computing of 33.86 petaflops per second. That's the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second.
The Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, knocks the U.S. Energy Department's Titan machine off the No. 1 spot. It achieved 17.59 petaflops per second.
Comments
Is a "flop" just bit-flipping, or is real work being done?
It has over three million Intel Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi cores and 4096 CPUs designed in China.
Not three million chips, but three million cores.
"Built at China's National University of Defense Technology, Tianhe-2 (also known as the Milky Way-2) consists of 16 000 nodes. Inside each node, two Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors run the show, adding up to a total of 3.12 million computing cores."
Still, 32,000 Intel CPU's and 48,000 Zeon Phi CPU's is a LOT of chips...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/tianhe2-caps-top-10-supercomputers
C.W.
If you put 25 Propellers in 16,000 nodes, you could beat that 3.12M core number!! Of course, your FLOPS would flop!
Still, the only thing that matters: Does it play Donky Kong?
Tony Stark to the Avengers: "THAT man is playing Galaga!"
Intel is just happy to have a steady customer.
The US builds something, China has to do it and do it better..
Satellites, space stations, subs, aircraft carriers, supercomputers... and so on.
It is a a merry chase in a 'Waste Race'. If only we could just get China to acknoledge that people need clean air, clean water, and good clean food... right now.
One more super gadget and suddenly we might have world conflict. Where is the fun in that?
In the Olympic celebration, a little girl with a fantastic singing voice was ousted. They replaced here with the image of a beautiful girl that couldn't sing and dubbed in the voice of the "ugly girl." People were outraged. They also faked the fireworks - it was only a feat of graphics that never happened. We also remember the fake tiger and many other things that could fill a book.
For years, I followed China' progress on their attempt to make a microcomputer. They built one, made a movie about it, but they showed how it didn't work. (very strange to make a movie about how something was a failure) It wouldn't run the OS or Windows and both the computational CPU results and red segment display were incorrect. After that, the USA became lenient in allowing computers to be shipped to China and world markets. Suddenly, by surprise, their supercomputer appeared.
During my stay in China, I made requests to see the space center that was mentioned on TV and the first supercomputer that was in the news, and was denied, possibly both were nonexistent at that time. They also reported sending a probe to the Moon which I followed with great interest on TV (reminded me of NASA's Ranger 7), but it was strange they couldn't produce any images from its camera. I was rather appalled to see Moon photos from the USA Apollo program shown, leading local residents astray.
I was able to meet a "space dignitary" who claimed he could show me the real China Moon probe photos. I pressed him on the topic and he finally shared his server. All I could find were computer generated graphics and lots of USA NASA space images. I did get to see China humanoid robots but they said the robots were broken and non functional. I went back a second time and the humanoids again were not working. I'm not sure what to think about China sometimes..
I just feel that the 'super-power status race' is wasting resource that humanity is ready and willing to deploy more wisely. Let's face it, every super-power requires people at the top with uber-egos.... not great humanitarians.... even the USA.
But it seems there is no technology that will keep rampant greed and deception under control.
People just have to be quietly vigilant and regularly demand more fair play and less waste.
Wow. Pure insane genius. With Big Brother, NSA data gathering and all, you sir, owe it to humanity to deploy the Big Brain against them to save us all before it's too late.
Bah-humbug! So what?
For example. The current world record for calculating the most number of digits of Pi stands at 10 trillion digits.
Now, with out having thought about it much I would have imagined that record breaking feat was performed by some gigantic and expensive super-computer like the one that is the topic of this thread.
But no, it was done on a pretty much off the shelf PC with a huge pile of hard disk space attached. Someting pretty much anyone could put together in their office. Whats's more the Pi digit calculating record has been held by a series of such machines since about 2009. Those super-computer behemoths just can't compete no matter how many FLOPs they have.
http://www.numberworld.org/misc_runs/pi-10t/details.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_computation_of_π
It doesn't matter if you have a super-computer, garbage is garbage (or trash). It is how you use it. It seems the Chinese have provided this for their role in the nuclear arms race... while Obama and the US would like to put that race in reverse.
Isn't the biggest computer in the world, the SETI screen saver shared computing project?
I can tell you, it was a weird and strange discovery, quite by accident. I learned that sometimes a guy's gotta throw in more just a stack of unwilling processors. Admonishingly, I had stripped the kitchen of all useful items and added all the chips (not potato) and all the boards and all the computers from the lab to make one giant "computer." The only things not used were the kitchen clock and sink, simply because it was either too high on the wall and I couldn't reach it, or too heavy and non-removable.
Well, if you're a Forum oldtimer, you've ghosted these halls long enough to know the office and laundry rooms were raided to build the BASIC Stamp supercomputer (clipboards, clothespins, etc).
In the evening, while sipping tea or coffee from the only available space in the corner, I was staring at the entangled conglomerate and got to thinking about a question - "Exactly where would this thing fit on the old retro scale of super computing?" One thing led to another and the next thing you know, I'm checking out something called the 500 list on internet.
To my total disbelief, it fit, albeit near the bottom, even though it was pushing only TeraFlops and not PetaFlops. After that, I became more interested in amateur super computing and seeing what I could accomplish by using stuff in other rooms (phones, tablets, smart toys, stuff). This blog was started for describing various experiments ever since.
"if all of China were to spit in the direction of Taiwan at the same time, we would simply drown." is a prevailing point of view.
And we have typhoons that purge the air. As for myself, I'd rather die comfortably from pollution in Taiwan, than live extremely impoverished in the USA to a ripe old age. Having prosperity is a messy and dirty business. Nice clean environments can be misleading, the Mafia always seem to manage to get the garbage picked up and the streets cleaned... but there are certainly some trade offs in that.
At least Taiwan doesn't have malaria or rabies. And all the other exotic tropical disease that one can get in various Asian countries are under good control. Between mosquitoes, ticks, snails, monkeys, and water-borne diseases, it can be quite easy to suddenly pass on without the problems of pollution.
It looks like "China pollution to Taiwan" is similar to Indonesia pollution to Singapore.
And far too many journalists are repetitive and should be made redundant.
For most of us, one flop per day is rather enough.
I just don't think I am right for really Big Data projects. But that doesn't mean that computing is a complete no fly zone.
I haven't yet gotten one of the two chips I bought to actually interface. But in theory, an RS232 boot is possible.
It really needs the outboard RAM and storage provided in the Demonstration package to be off any use to anyone. And in all honest, I strongly suspect the interior processors are gridlocked.. unless there is some brilliant concept that I have missed.
The best thing I have learned is that the Propeller i/o scheme with every processor having the ability to reach the outside world or to share data around the hub is a lot more pleasant to work with than bumping data from one processor to the next just to get a startup configuration.
In sum... the GA144 is weird and driving me nuts.... very little i/o for 144 processors. I guess there is a number crunching or a video handling aspect that I just don't know.
It seems a lot of CPU time is spent in passing left, right, up, or down. Thank God the Propeller doesn't do that. You can just set aside i/o pins to use alone, or to share.