The U.S Just Beat China to develop the world's fastest supercomputer
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Wrong [0]
> This "race" has been a global endeavour since the 50's
From the article:
> But the United States retook the lead thanks to a machine, called Summit, built for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
When computers are used for nuclear weapons simulation, it's clearly not a global endeavor.
The DOD stopped reporting many of their computers to the list though, so it’s anyone’s guess where those would land.
Edit: US weapons work that is. I would imagine China uses at least one of theirs for classified work.
And it's almost affordable https://raptorcs.com/TALOSIILITE/ you might think it's a joke but $1k does seem cheap compared to the prices for motherboards in their main product.
Summit has significant higher peak performance at slightly higher power. It also has significantly fewer nodes, with higher performance per node.
A least some things never change.
Half as many nodes as Titan, way higher power efficiency, NVLink2 interconnect between CPU and GPU, ATS unified memory between all GPUs plus CPU, etc.
For instance, let's say China gets theirs out first, but the US releases one several months later that is substantially more powerful. Did China win the "race"? Or did the US?
This can be looked at as a continuous race to see who can build the highest-throughput computer, where the competitors' positions in the race are decided based on a well-defined set of benchmarks. The periodic updates don't indicate who's won -- they're just a snapshot of what everyone's positions are in the race around the time of publication. So it's more apt to say one competitor is ahead of another in the race, but talking about winning or beating someone maybe gets more clicks.
I seem to recall that some years ago they used some Xeons and other "consumer-level" processors, just with special interconnects and maybe even using special versions, but they seemed like pretty close cousins to the regular processors of a desktop.
Is this still the case? I see in the Top500 list that the Sunway TaihuLight uses the Sunway SW26010 260C processors.
Are they fundamentally different than consumer-level processors? any special architectures or other interesting parts? or are they pretty similar, just built for massive interconnection and such?
In this case it's using more or less off the shelf POWER9s and Nvidia GPUs.
But seriously though. Why does the news media seem to always feel the need to push this narrative of nations being in competition with each other? It seems so 20th century.
Early 20th century, I might add.
This is one of the reasons why they're losing so much trust.
Sorry, but this is the actual bullshit narrative. Most media outlets, especially ones that Trump loves to rail against, are reporting record profits. That, to me, shows that people trust them more than ever.
I'm not sure about the U.S., but from my personal experience working in a multi-national industry, and also being East Asian myself, patriotism is a huge motivational factor, especially when it comes to beating "rival" countries. (Prime example: Korea vs Japan).
This is how you get your budget cut. Competition forces tough decisions and turns long-term strategic aims into near-term threats.
Competition around destructive or hateful things is bad.
I'm OK with another space race, but not another nuclear arms race.
The space race was basically a PR veneer over part of the nuclear arms race.
Either Google or Amazon has the world's fastest supercomputer. The notion that China ever led that, was beligerently fraudulent (only good for selling sensationalism), it intentionally ignored that the nature of supercomputing has completely changed over the last 20 years.
The same could be said of the Soviet Union in the space, missile and other technological races. Two responses. One, it's a beneficial and not particularly risky lie. Two, the downsides to mistakenly thinking it's a lie are greater than those to mistakenly thinking it's the truth.
We can argue about whether modern simulation codes look like LINPACK (they don't) but neither Google's nor Amazon's cloud is competitive for that type of workload. Even if the clouds are physically bigger, nobody at Google or Amazon is running really big numerical jobs of the sort that DOE does. Many are running smaller scale HPC and ML jobs, but it's expensive, and for latency-bound physics simulations (most of what we run at LLNL, ORNL, etc.), cloud networks will not perform at scale.
The question of whether China's machines ever performed well for big multi-physics applications is up in the air, but they were certainly beating us on LINPACK. The Chinese set out to show that they're serious about HPC, and I think they accomplished at least that. I wouldn't be surprised if you saw this race go back and forth a few times in the coming years.
But it's a wider problem than that. Interconnects expand the possible workloads, but that's always job specific. A single overclocked CPU would crush this for a huge range of tasks, but that in no way means it's not a super computer.
So, sure this thing is going to be useful, but Google still has vastly more compute and Google uses it for more economically valuable jobs.