China Pulls Ahead of U.S. in Latest TOP500 List of Supercomputers

DooKey

DooKey

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The fiftieth TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world has China overtaking the US in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 143. It is the largest number of supercomputers China has ever claimed on the TOP500 ranking, with the US presence shrinking to its lowest level since the list’s inception 25 years ago. The Chinese may have started out slow, but they are a juggernaut now when it comes to technology growth. The rest of the world better watch out.

Just six months ago, the US led with 169 systems, with China coming in at 160. Despite the reversal of fortunes, the 144 systems claimed by the US gives them a solid second place finish, with Japan in third place with 35, followed by Germany with 20, France with 18, and the UK with 15.
 
They're computing things I don't like, quite frankly!

:D
 
The number they have is not the most impressive, it's that they have done it with their own CPUs/GPUs, as the US government applies restrictions on what and how many CPUs/GPUs Intel/AMD/NV are allowed to sell to China as the US was going to push them out of the supercomputer game, so China developed it's own systems from the ground up.
 
BlueFireIce said:
The number they have is not the most impressive, it's that they have done it with their own CPUs/GPUs, as the US government applies restrictions on what and how many CPUs/GPUs Intel/AMD/NV are allowed to sell to China as the US was going to push them out of the supercomputer game, so China developed it's own systems from the ground up.
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From the ground up? I don't think so. They can buy Intel, AMD, IBM, nVidia systems and study the chips all they want. Now there's nothing wrong with that, if they can make a even better chip from reverse engineering. When you make chips are the rest of the world, there's no way you don't pickup some skills on designing said chips.
 
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Gasaraki_ said:
From the ground up? I don't think so. They can buy Intel, AMD, IBM, nVidia systems and study the chips all they want. Now there's nothing wrong with that, if they can make a even better chip from reverse engineering. When you make chips are the rest of the world, there's no way you don't pickup some skills on designing said chips.
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Actually no. Considering the chip is based on MIPS and is of RISC design, which is closer to ARM, however Chinas is indeed home brewed and doesn't even have native x86 support, but is done through emulation. Your reasoning is the same as saying "Honda didn't build that car from the ground up considering they were able to study other cars", give me a break.

They also do not care much about off the shelf CPUs, they are designing for number crunching for supercomputers, which takes a design change from a general purpose CPU in computers today.
 
BlueFireIce said:
Actually no. Considering the chip is based on MIPS and is of RISC design, which is closer to ARM, however Chinas is indeed home brewed and doesn't even have native x86 support, but is done through emulation. Your reasoning is the same as saying "Honda didn't build that car from the ground up considering they were able to study other cars", give me a break.

They also do not care much about off the shelf CPUs, they are designing for number crunching for supercomputers, which takes a design change from a general purpose CPU in computers today.
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Most super computers these days are getting the PF FP math numbers of MIMD units on dedicated cards. The cpu just doles out the data to these cards to work on. And the biggest name in massively parallel vector processing these days is: <you fill in the blank> Truth is you can make these computers as big as you want. The only limitation is their practicality. There's only so many near-infinite scale vector math problems in the world (ie: F@Home, SETI @ Home, crypto (including currency)) Even atomic simulation has a limit as to the number of parallel vectors it can launch before performance degrades.

Super computers like this are usually divided time wise between projects and work on more than one task.
 
Hehehe, I just imagined a PCB with rows and rows of R3000s. :D
 
Ok, my fellow Hard-Ones (hmmm doesn't sound right)... Let's merge all our overclocked beasts together and ... actually I don't know what. What group project would we work on?

Anyway my train of thought left the station already, but *shakes fist at China* we'll show them! Show them what I don't know.
 
Gasaraki_ said:
From the ground up? I don't think so. They can buy Intel, AMD, IBM, nVidia systems and study the chips all they want. Now there's nothing wrong with that, if they can make a even better chip from reverse engineering. When you make chips are the rest of the world, there's no way you don't pickup some skills on designing said chips.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunway

You know its only a matter of time before Sunway chips run more then just Chinese supercomputers.

There isn't anything in their latest chips they are licencing or would need to. Playing down Chinese engineers and pretending they are nothing but cloners is what got the US where it is right now. They have production sure but that isn't all they have. Clearly China has plenty of people who know their shit. Their gov is solidly behind making them and their product great. The US laws to clamp down on selling China chips has seriously backfired... and I am not sure there is any fixing it now.
 
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Burticus said:
Ok, my fellow Hard-Ones (hmmm doesn't sound right)... Let's merge all our overclocked beasts together and ... actually I don't know what. What group project would we work on?

Anyway my train of thought left the station already, but *shakes fist at China* we'll show them! Show them what I don't know.
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There is a whole sub forum here for just that...
 
Gasaraki_ said:
From the ground up? I don't think so. They can buy Intel, AMD, IBM, nVidia systems and study the chips all they want. Now there's nothing wrong with that, if they can make a even better chip from reverse engineering. When you make chips are the rest of the world, there's no way you don't pickup some skills on designing said chips.
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China does very little if any of their own design. More likely they took the CPU's they are building for other vendors.. built their own production facilities and started cranking out their own in bulk to meet their compute needs. That's how China operates in just about every business.
 
grtitan said:
Meanwhile, our beloved politicians continue to feed us to our beloved deities called corporations.

The rest goes to an unmaintainable military black hole.
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It's ok, the Chinese half of our military R&D anyway since our "cybersecurity" is so great! :cautious:
 
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