Chinese Supercomputer Now Fastest on Earth | Hacker News Reader

Chinese Supercomputer Now Fastest on Earth

nytimes.com

15 pointsakitchell6 comments

What I find interesting about this is that apparently the Chinese have developed their own interconnect 'sauce' rather than using Infiniband or whatever. The article does not mention Linux but I presume that is the operating software they are using. Oh yeah, reading the comment section in Engadget to this article reminded me why I stopped even scanning Engadget posts, talk about infantile.

What I find more interesting is this bit:

"Mr. Dongarra said a long-running Chinese project to build chips to rival those from Intel and others remained under way and looked promising. "It’s not quite there yet, but it will be in a year or two," he said. "

Can anyone comment on how much that comment reflects reality? I don't doubt China has the ability to do this, but at the same time, China does have a reputation when it comes to reaching parity with western designs...

My understanding was that they were using MIPS derivatives or CPUs that used the MIPS instruction set.

> What I find interesting about this is that apparently the Chinese have developed their own interconnect

This isn't uncommon in the HPC world. E.g., IBM's Blue Gene/L series features a custom torus interconnect.

Apparently this interconnect is so good it's not available outside China. I wonder if any technical information will be available.

  can perform mathematical operations about 29 million times 
  faster than one of the earliest supercomputers, built in 
  1976.

I would like to know how fast is a macbook pro compared to one of the earliest supercomputer, built in 1976.

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