Chinese Tianhe-1A Supercomputer Starts Churning Out the Science 103
gupg writes "When China built the world's fastest supercomputer based on NVIDIA GPUs last year, a lot of naysayers said this was just a stunt machine. Well, guess what — here comes the science! They are working on better material for solar panels and they ran the world's fastest simulation ever. NVIDIA (whose GPUs accelerate these applications as a co-processor) blogged on this a while ago, where they talk about how the US really needs to up its investment in high performance computing."
The US falling behind in science.. (Score:2, Insightful)
"how the US really needs to up its investment in high performance computing."
As long as the defense industry continues to give (contribute) generously to members of the US government we can rest assured that the USofA will spend every buck it can print on useless, futile, BULLSHIT wars to the exclusion of any science, no matter how important.
Wars are BIG business, nobody in the government gives a shit about "terrorism" or "defending freedom", all any of these cynical, crooked parasites care about is money and the pursuit of absolute power!
And talk about BS (Score:4, Insightful)
"The US really needs to up its investment in high performance computing."
Really? Well let's have a look at the top500 list shall we? Now while Linpack leaves some things to be desired (like the fact that clusters perform better on it than they can on some things like particle simulation) but it is the standard.
So of the top 10 system 5, half, are in the US. #2, 5, 7, 8 and 10 are US computers. The next 10? 7 of them in the US. So 12 of the top 20 are US systems. Most of them are US government systems too, and the ones that aren't are university. So not like "Big companies that happen to be in the US," but research universities and government research agencies like the DOE and so on.
It also isn't stopping. The Advanced Simulation & Computing Program (formerly ASCI) is going on and more computers are being built. LANL has chosen Cray to build the next one, Cielo. It is partially complete and online now, though still being added to. Currently #10 on the list, it will move up a bit when it is complete.
So I don't see the US as not investing in this.
What I see them not doing is buying nVidia GPU based systems, which is fine. GPUs are neat and all but they are not as general purpose as CPUs. They are stream processors. Now if your project is one that stream processors are good at then great. However not all projects are. Particle simulation, that I mentioned before, is one that stream processors aren't so good at. So just because something is higher on the Linpack based top500, doesn't mean it is faster at everything.
Regardless, it isn't like the US needs to be on the number 1 spot to be good. The more telling fact is how many are there, that the US has over half of the systems in the top 20. Clearly supercomputers are something the US has plenty of. Keep going down the list and you keep seeing a lot of US systems.
This is just nVidia trying to play on the whole patriotism thing to make sales.
Re:No shit? (Score:2, Insightful)
Debt is a distraction. Ask Dick Cheney, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter."
Re:When will it be used for its real purpose... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think The Chinese government has much better ways of spying on people than to hog processor time on such a public machine. He'll, they don't even need to break RSA keys anymore.
I love how people jump to the conclusion that any powerful computer that we learn about in China is suddenly s security threat. It's the ones they don't tell you about that you should be concerned about.
Funny how people marvel if it's the US but run in fear if it's China. Both have terrible track records when it comes to human rights.