Anyone can build a big enough supercomputer if you throw enough money at the problem. This high level of spending is getting hard to justify, however, because most of the problems you want to solve can't be solved just by throwing another order of magnitude of computing power at the problem. Building a supercomputer becomes a bit of a boondoggle, a public-relations move.
But China can't build the components for those supercomputers. Nobody can build all of them, but China can't fab the processors. Search for "list of semiconductor fabs", find a table, sort by node, and then scroll down until you find a Chinese node that does something other than just churn out flash memory. You'll find SMIC with a couple 40nm or 45nm fabs. That's not just the last generation of tech, that's three generations old (14 [current] => 22 => 32 => 45).
By comparison, the market is flooded with cheap 32nm Xeons being dumped from our data centers.
And no, we have not moved away from supercomputers or building bigger ones.
That would close the gap to Intel/Samsung/TSMC to one generation.
[1] http://www.smics.com/eng/press/press_releases_details.php?id...
That statement shows you have no idea what's involved in developing one.
The "Washington Consensus" believed that no country could develop or resist the temptations of the "superior" culture and understanding of the western financial system and industry. That the countries that they were moving into were hopeless without their intelligence and guidance and would quickly fall in line and become dependent and helpless without their western overlords. They believed that they would always have a military advantage, that they would always get to set the rules. The financial crash, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The political transformation, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. The internet liberalization, predicted for the last 10 years, didn't happen. Now the Chinese are catching up technologically and them actually getting ahead of us which, from a socio/political perspective, is akin to negative interest rates. It's a discontinuous transformation that inverts all the equations of western thinking.
Let me give you a quick example to illustrate this. Recently, I was in the pacific northwest. I was talking to a developer who was pointing at a lot that was basically a clean hole in the ground. He said that a Chinese developer was going to build a 5 story building their in two weeks and the entire structure was manufactured in China with ducts, plumbing, wiring all up to American code and all the floor units just had to be unloaded, placed with a crane and snapped together. (Look up "Broad Sustainable Building Group", among several companies in China doing this, if you want to learn more about this technology). The local developers were mystified. As if you told someone in 1990 that calling people anywhere in the world would be free over the internet. I think we're going to be seeing more and more of that: stuff coming out of China that will mystify us because we didn't invent it. The first mystifying innovation was the financial system that never crashed. The rest are coming.
They've been talking about building the world's tallest building in only 90 days for years, but they recently dropped the idea because it was never a serious proposal. Buildings of this height need rigidity from huge amounts of steel and concrete. That much concrete that can't cure in the time frames they're talking about, and hooking modular sections together they way they're doing it isn't rigid enough.
The technology is so far away from doing what they said they would that it's laughable.
But prefab building technology on the scale they are actually building, as opposed to what they say in they're press releases, isn't "mystifying."
A US company could also raise a prefab 50 story building in 2 weeks. If the government loaned them hundreds of millions of dollars, allowed them to ignore worker safety and environmental laws, and they ignored any long term maintenance considerations.
It wouldn't be profitable, just like it's not profitable China. And it wouldn't last 40 years, just like the buildings in China won't last 40 years.
Not to mention that almost everyone believes they are fudging the numbers on the total prep time.
Ever been to a hackathon where teams technically built a product in 2 days but spent a month rehearsing what they were going to do once the clock started?
There's plenty of speculation that's exactly what Broad Sustainable Building Group is doing. Not that the state run media is ever going to allow any of their critics to talk openly.
I'll leave you with a word from the company themselves. "Sustainable Building Group's prefab technology is] the most profound innovation in human history." Really? You're buying this?
I didn't say they built the tallest building in the world. They built a 54 story buildings and five story buildings are certainly realistic.
>A US company could also put up a 40 story building in 2 weeks. If the government loaned them hundreds of millions of dollars, allowed them to ignore worker safety and environmental laws, and they ignored any long term maintenance considerations
The whole "they cheat" meme is part of every criticism of China. China actually makes stuff though. The funny part about IKEA and other western retailers opening in China is that they had a very hard time competing because the locals just copied theit designs and sold them cheaper down the street. Unlike other markets they operate in, the locals can make things at a competitive cost. If you don't actually make anything you can demand all this abstract perfection. Most of the products that Americans buy in stores are made in China, including the cell phone or computer you are reading this on.
>It wouldn't be profitable, just like it's not profitable China. And it wouldn't last 40 years, just like the buildings in China won't last 40 years. Sure the government gives out lots of money, but that's communist central planning in action. Seems to be working better than the McMansion bubble.
The Chinese are not an inherently superior civilization to the Americans, thus the Americans could do the same thing if they got their act together. We rely on dumb wall street money to allocate capital that chases whatever bubble is hip at the moment. China allocates capital via giving banks very specific lending instructions. Different systems, and they seem to have some advantages.
Of course there are advantages to planned economies. In the 60s, the US was absolutely terrified that the Russian command economy gave them overwhelming advantages that we couldn't compete with.
And If you went to school in the early 90s you'll remember that there was a real fear that we'd have to start going to school on Saturdays to keep up with the Japanese.
I can almost guarantee that in about 30 years, we'll have a panic about India.
>I didn't say they built the tallest building in the world. They built a 54 story buildings and five story buildings are certainly realistic.
Never said you did. My argument is that the company is essentially a propaganda machine, as evidenced by their repeated claims (and failed attempts) that they are going to build the world's tallest building.
>The whole "they cheat" meme is part of every criticism of China.
I'm not making a moral argument about China. I'm telling you the reason that they can accomplish many of the things that they are accomplishing is because they aren't restricted by the same rules.
They can have cheap factories because they don't have strong labor laws, and they don't have strict emissions controls.
The thing is though, all of that will end as their standard of living increases. It's already happening. People are tired of living in smog, so they are introducing stricter emission controls. People aren't living like rural peasants anymore so they are demanding higher wages.
As these things happen, growth will slow. Sure they're GDP will eclipse ours one day, so will India's most likely, but it's going to take a lot longer than naive extrapolation predicts it will.
They are able to finish onsite construction quickly because their buildings are modularized and 90% of the work is done in the factory.
I think that group-narcissism got the better of Uber. Is Uber likely to be headed up by high-functioning narcissists? Well, let's start with the name, dictionary definition being:
'Uber - denoting an outstanding or supreme example of a particular kind of person or thing.'
Then there is the idea that they can just waltz in to the China market (where most people were riding Flying Pigeon bicycles not so long ago) and make a success of it, spending investors money as if it was water. All they have for that money is an easily copied app. Uber have no local knowledge, no appreciation of local ways, just ego and arrogance, all said in the name and it is no surprise that it went pear shaped.
Facebook, Twitter, those things are where narcissists go to get likes. This works well in the West where everyone is a special snowflake, but China is not like that so it is no surprise that, technical hurdles aside, our social media is different to their social media...
Every company wants to be the best and we all want to work for the best companies, however, the leadership does not have to be a small in-group of ultra-narcissists. For instance, HN darling Tesla seems devoid of narcissism and is more about altruism. Google seems wired that way too. If Google and Tesla take over the world and outer space I will be happy with that. If the corporate narcissists such as Uber run the show then they will not last, arrogance will get the better of them and our new Chinese overlords will replace them.
At the end of the day, most of these computers are just a pissing contest and are rarely cost effective, and are almost always a huge pain in the ass to use.
If you think the Chinese military is going to be using quantum computers before the American military, then you've got my attention.
China plans to launch a satellite named QUESS to perform quantum encryption and communication experiments later this month. They also have some other quantum computing projects that seem to be going well.
They have ridiculous manpower at their factories working 24/7 to make billions of phones, utilizing that type of experience to fabricate couple hundreds of thousands of chips to build a super computer can probably take a couple of months. Assembly is probably another couple months and getting the software in order is probably another couple of months.
Now if it was a US gov't contract, it would probably take a decade...
China does not have semiconductor fabs capable of producing anything close to a current generation Intel 14nm process Core i7 or Xeon CPU.
A buggy supercomputer that's down most of the time. In practice, Titan is still the world's fastest supercomputer. This isn't to say that China won't pass the US for real in supercomputing; it's just at the current moment their supercomputer is really only the best on paper.
EDIT: Actually, I didn't notice that the Sunway TaihuLight became active in June. I don't much about this supercomputer, so my comment only applies to the Tianhe-2.
How laughable.
Is anyone in the world using a Chinese based OS? Is anyone outside of China really even using a Chinese OS derived from American ones?
Is anyone in the US really using Chinese software?
Can you name any big Chinese products or services that we use in the West besides cheap commodity stuff?
From [1]:
>However, as we know LINPACK does not tell the whole story. On the HPCG benchmark, Sunway TaihuLight reported only .371 petaflops, which is .3 percent of peak. Compare this with 0.580 petaflops on Tianhe-2 (1.1 percent of peak) and .322 petaflops on Titan (1.2 percent of peak). RIKEN’s K computer reports 0.460 HPCG performance, 4.1 percent theoretical peak.
1: https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/06/19/china-125-petaflops-sunwa...
EDIT: To be more blunt, this machine might have more PR value than scientific value.
It is quite historic on its own, but the utility isn't quite what you might expect.
For most applications the processing elements will be so starved for data that they are just an idle waste of energy.
http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-...
If I wanted rank #1 on the top500 list, had $900 million sitting around and wanted to build something faster, I could, by hiring some of the people responsible for building massive datacenter facilities in the US (750,000 sq ft+) with their associated cooling, generator, UPS systems, and buying several metric shitloads of 1U supermicro dual xeon systems.
All of that also assumes that it's a supercomputer designed for compute tasks that can be neatly divided up into small chunks and doesn't require a totally proprietary bespoke interconnect (rather, it can use something COTS).
It is a budget problem, not technical: Are you prepared to fork out the money for a hundred 200 kilowatt air conditioners all running in parallel? Do you have the real estate for them and their air handlers?
we are way past that point. China has leap frogged pretty much everyone else in every aspect. It took China less than a year to build the worlds fastest supercomputer (unclassified) after US placed restrictions on related technology exports to China.
China was building components for supercomputers over the past decade, they would show case a network, a small processor, cooling system etc individually. No one and I say again, NO ONE, expected they would build a full system at such a capability in such a short time.