China is now home to some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers
economist.com
economist.com
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1094092.shtml
The other issue, I guess, is that the west decided this was just a pissing context not worth playing. Heck, when I was in grad school (U of Utah) they would out the SGI supercomputer they had together to do world rating benchmarks and then promptly divide it afterwards into multiple computers because it wasn’t very useful in that mode. If you are simulating your nuclear explosions well enough already, the demand for ever faster super computers simply isn’t there when a cluster of GPUs will give you much better bang for the buck for newer tasks like machine learning.
It's a story about unsavory government behavior going unchecked not about private industry achievement.
That is like me saying something like this: they may be 1.4 billion strong, but most me are considered unhappy and sexually frustrated by policy design.
>China has many millions more men than women, a hangover of the country's one-child policy, which was overturned in 2015, though its effects will last decades more. The gender imbalance is making it hard for many men to find a partner – and the gap is likely to widen.
>By 2020, it’s estimated there will be 30 million more men than women looking for a partner. In his book, The Demographic Future, American political economist Nicholas Eberstadt cites projections that by 2030, more than a quarter of Chinese men in their 30s will not have married.
(http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170213-why-millions-of-ch...)
I used to work CFIUS issues for the DoD and can tell you that the government preventing tech from being exported when both parties (developer and acquirer) want to share basically never happens.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2908692/us-blocks-intel-from...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3085483/high-performan...
This might be a key factor in the drastic rise. China is annually graduating about 8 times as many STEM degree holders as the US, as of 2016:
"...In 2013, 40 percent of Chinese graduates finished a degree in STEM, over twice the share in American third level institutions."
"The World Economic Forum reported that China had 4.7 million recent STEM graduates in 2016. India, another academic powerhouse, had 2.6 million new STEM graduates last year while the U.S. had 568,000."
Source: The Countries With The Most STEM Graduates [Infographic] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/02/02/the-co...
Cloud compute systems are the next evolution of supercomputing. Or put a better way, the traditional supercomputers being measured, are history.
It'd be like holding up 56k modem market leadership today as a sign of technological dominance.
Quantum communications and certain NLP applications/technologies are some areas that China has likely surpassed the US. These are definitely not comparable to 56k modem.
Traditional supercomputers, except in isolated use cases, are a thing of the past. Nearly all supercomputing work will be done in the cloud in the not very distant future, supercomputing will continue to shrink.
China's use of supercomputing is because on the whole they're still a decade behind on adopting cloud computing (which is why Alibaba, their leader in the segment, has such a small business compared to the US cloud giants).
You can search ‘quantum communications china’ for more references.
For NLP research: https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/. See the teams behind top algorithms.
For real-world NLP: Xiaoyi (Little Doctor) was the first (and currently the only) AI that passed a medical licensing exam that human doctors need to pass (and rote learning is not enough to pass): http://sites.ieee.org/futuredirections/2017/12/02/congrats-x...
[1] https://www.opensciencegrid.org/ [2] http://www.nersc.gov/ [3] https://www.alcf.anl.gov/
Although, Azure is currently doing some HPC offerings.
One reason for that: It could be harder for a Chinese student to get into Tsinghua than a US student to get into MIT. The same likely holds for a range of other institutions as well. This is based on corresponding admission rates. Also, on average, Chinese students have better math background than American students.
Obviously, MIT, Stanford, etc. currently have higher prestige in the world's eyes. It doesn't mean though that the education there is always more rigorous than top-level institutions in China.
https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-examples-of-hard-Chinese...
By the way, SAT Math questions are generally considered a piece of cake by most good students in East Asia (and they often get 800 or close without much extra preparation), which says something about the level of average American high school math education.
The SATs are simple math. The GREs are as simple, which is presumably four years farther along than the SATs. However, it's hard answering all those questions correctly in the given time frame (presumably). You'd need a randomly sampled set of chinese kids taking the SATs to see where they fit against our distribution of scores to draw further conclusions. Bear in mind, too, top american students are studying advanced math in high school (advanced meaning, enough to reasonably answer the questions on the quora page, with time to practice and get used to things like the proof questions)
Note: I'm not trying to justify the american education system, just providing commentary and trying to level the comparison a bit.
Note that fewer percentage of Chinese youths attend high school than American, so that might skew the comparison.
Anyway, don't mean to argue - it does appear on the news a lot "the chinese are out mathing us! America sucks!" with some political finger pointing, and my reaction is usually a facepalm coupled with wondering how controlled the comparison is.
See: http://ncee.org/2016/12/pisa-2015-results/
The range of schools in PISA is much broader than the top sliver of students in Phillips Exeter etc you mentioned.
0/4, none of these are really under the aegis of the Beijing regime - and while it is flattering of you to compare the entirety of the population of four countries with 40 million people to the single most selective school in the US, it is rather inaccurate to do so.
If you look closer, PISA 2015 also had China in there, where the four provinces Jiangsu, Guangdong, Beijing, and Shanghai participated. Now poor illiterate migrants' kids might not get hukous to Beijing schools, so you might be right that this might be slightly biased - but even these four richer provinces have nearly the population of the US, so even if only 200 million Chinese are "outmathing us", it still makes a massive difference.
On average, Chinese from the big cities have better math background than all Americans, not on average for the entire country. Compulsory education in china stops at 9th grade, and small city/rural schools are incredibly underfunded compared to PISA-record beating shanghai.
I've also heard rumors that utilization on real world workloads is very bad. (Not necessarily agreeing, just relaying hearsay).
They take upon something niche and obscure, but with great promise to give tons of offshoot tech and give breakthrough boosts to existing industry: renewable energy, batteries, rare earth metals, FPGAs, lights-off factories at scale... etc...
They play quiet for few years, before quickly locking down everything when there is zero change anybody catching up to Chinese companies.
Chicoms manage their economy as a single Japanese style conglomerate.
See how it went with renewable, China has a lockdown on the tech,
This is what happens the best "copier" copies from the best.
China spent almost all of the last 30 years copying developed nations to try to catch up. They're still aggressively doing it across every field, from reverse engineering Russian jet engines, to stealing IP & copying US fighter jets, to using CRISPR knowledge & technology developed in the West to try to leap frog, to the Landwind clone of the Land Rover. Their phones remain copies of what Apple and Samsung are doing; nearly all of their domestic phones run versions of Android, because they can't build their own OS yet. Copying permeates their entire economy.
That isn't in fact a criticism or a negative. It makes sense for any poor or undeveloped nation - which China absolutely was until recently - to do that to attempt to rapidly improve.
That "therefore" is a negative and in my opinion more than anything shows that American has been leading the world for so long that they can't even conceive that might not be the case at some point in the future. Even people in tech who should be paying attention dismiss it by saying "nah, they can't really innovate, they're just copying, and therefore will never surpass us".
I guess time will tell.
China has had a huge population and economy for decades. Almost by definition they will play an important role in the future of the internet. Anyone who said otherwise was wrong then and is wrong now.
That was not my intention. Instead, my implication was that the dismissal of China's progress that you see in HN was entirely motivated by nationalism, not objective analysis of the facts. If you were trying to objectively analyze of the facts the rational conclusion should be "this is really complex, who knows how it's going to turn out."
In the age of cloud computing, does the number of supercomputers even indicate anything except the ability to run simulations on climate and nuclear fallout?
Personally, I wish someone created a more intelligent, less cronyist, less wasteful, but as willing to experiment alternative to the US tech industry. But it's definitely not China today that is even more reliant on meaningless KPIs than the corporate America. Of course, when the dear leader has an ambition to make the country a superpower, it makes sense to order more supercomputers.
In general, I think we're still in the denial/anger phase, with a trend towards the latter. You can literally feel the seething anger just reading some of the comments here.
What I've heard is that most of the Chinese supercomputers do really well on the LINPACK benchmark and rather much more poorly on real workloads.