Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love this very naive view. China is 100% trying to beat and surpass the US as a superpower. They are not benevolent at all. Have a look at the ridiculous claims on the South China Sea for a start. I have spent lots of time in China. They still want payback for the humiliation they believe they endured in the 1800s. That is a one of the single most important driving factors in everything they do.
I don't know much about Chinese history. What humiliation did they endure in the 1800s?
U.S. Invests $258M in Supercomputing Race with China
31–40 of 82 posts
Re: U.S. Invests $258M in Supercomputing Race with China
#32I've spent a lot of time in country X. They all want Y.
Okay. That's the kind of crap that was in the 1800's, that's still in the 2010's, unfortunately.
Your words sound like something from a grown up bully jealous of their victim's achievements in life.
Re: U.S. Invests $258M in Supercomputing Race with China
#33Re: U.S. Invests $258M in Supercomputing Race with China
#34Competition is good. For research, The Cold War with Russia and the resulting "Space Race" was good. In Israel, they spend a much larger share of their national income on R&D, largely to develop technologies to defend themselves.
This. I'd argue one of the biggest problems facing the United States right now is that there is a (falsely) perceived lack of competition / existential threats which is making us lazy and complacent.
Re: U.S. Invests $258M in Supercomputing Race with China
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
And a mere 2% the cost of the USS Gerald Ford (which would probably be destroyed within 24 hours of active war with China)
I would like to see the details if your tactical analysis on that.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-10/china-warns-washing...
Taken with a grain of salt: China might not actually be 'there' yet, but they are progressing toward that goal.
Re: U.S. Invests $258M in Supercomputing Race with China
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They realize we're in a second cold war... For God's sake, don't start another cold war. This is an established incumbent, who has monopolized world power for decades, feeling threatened by a new kid in town. Any progress China has made has been labeled as threat, cold war, or dismissed as useless, or blamed on China's stealing US secrets. As an instance, China bought many Intel chips to create supercomputers. Then…
I love this very naive view. China is 100% trying to beat and surpass the US as a superpower. They are not benevolent at all. Have a look at the ridiculous claims on the South China Sea for a start. I have spent lots of time in China. They still want payback for the humiliation they believe they endured in the 1800s. That is a one of the single most important driving factors in everything they do.
You need to chill out and look at the future, not the past. If you dwell on the past, many countries have invaded many other countries. The British colonized and ruled the US for a long time. The US invaded Mexico and seized large portion of California and Texas. Even recently, the US invaded Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, among others. China was the leading power for hundreds of years, way longer than the US or Britain. China rarely colonized other countries. The Chinese people look at the future, not the past.
Re: U.S. Invests $258M in Supercomputing Race with China
#37USG has tons of compute. What we don't have is the tooling behind AWS or GCP (minus GovCloud which is mainly inaccessible due to infosec and budgetary insanity). Our scientists look at what could be, look at their very interesting datasets, and then gnash their teeth for want of better tooling. People know this. Senior people from industry have screamed at senior government leadership that they are 20 years behind an…
AWS is a terrible match for super computing hardware. Sure, there are some embarrassingly parallel workloads that don't need fast interconnects, but mostly latency or memory becomes the issue.
Gcp has it's tpus though...
Re: U.S. Invests $258M in Supercomputing Race with China
#38This is chump change, we should have invested $2.58 billion or more. China isn't taking half measures in their state's science and technology investments. They realize we're in a second cold war, just one where the two combatants have more economic interdependence. They are making investments like the ones that helped us win the last war.
It's not like the DoE are the only ones with expensive computers: The NSA has their underground lair. There's a commercial need for expensive distributed processing now, with Google/AWS/Azure spending a lot on video cards. The ML craze may make government spending on supercomputers less important, especially if people prefer to distribute calculations on many interchangeable computers. I wouldn't mind a few NSF or Do…
these things get run in phases. phase 1 they insist on novel architectures, rethinking of basic premises, required involvement by academics.
by the end of phase 3 when they actually procure machines its mostly 'just give me one of what you're already shipping, and it better run MPI well'
doe exascale was supposed to be fundamentally different. because by the time you got there all the incremental improvements in power and latency management weren't nearly enough anymore...my guess is that they'll just make big gpu clusters and call it a day
its probably not that much money in the scheme of things, but the sad (or good) depending on your perspective is that HPC got so far out of the mainstream that when corporations finally got around to worrying about scaling, they just did their own thing. so I guess they can thank darpa/doe for infiniband? not really?
and they're still running fortran/mpi
Re: U.S. Invests $258M in Supercomputing Race with China
#39I've spent a lot of time in country X. They all want Y. Okay. That's the kind of crap that was in the 1800's, that's still in the 2010's, unfortunately. Your words sound like something from a grown up bully jealous of their victim's achievements in life.
China is deeply racist and expansionist. Their claims on various parts of India are totally ridiculous. Their annexation Tibet is also blatantly illegal.
China is not USA, it is not full of white people and multiculturalism. China will eventually trigger WW-3.
Re: U.S. Invests $258M in Supercomputing Race with China
#40Why is this in the DOE budget?