China surpassing U.S. with 54.9 petaflop supercomputer

Computerworld - China has produced a supercomputer capable of 54.9 petaflops, more than twice the speed of any system in the U.S., according to a U.S. researcher who was in China last week and learned the details. China's latest system was built with Intel chips, but includes indigenously produced Chinese technologies as well. The Chinese government spent about $290 million on it.

China has a new supercomputer which is the fastest in the world. I wouldn't doubt there would be competition between countries with building supercomputers for many reasons.
Source

I wonder how long it would take to bruteforce my ATS accounts password

reply to post by Phoenix267

China's latest large system is the successor to its Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which won the global title as the world's fastest in November 2010. President Obama made note of China's supercomputing accomplishment in his state of the union speech in January, 2011, where he said the U.S. was facing another "Sputnik moment" in wide range of technologies.

Hmm i wonder is the US will fake a faster computer like they faked the moon landing to win the space race to the moon?

i wonder who china stole the design for this computer from?
they stole everything else they make.

reply to post by Phoenix267


already, is China deciding to land on Mars by next year aswell

I'll bet I could run some great game servers on that!

Oh.. Err.. nvm.. They didn't make it for that, huh?

Originally posted by hounddoghowlie
i wonder who china stole the design for this computer from?
they stole everything else they make.

Yeah what did the Chinese ever do for us?

Well,

Battens in cloth Belt drives The blast furnaces Bituminous coke Cast iron The chain drive The repeating crossbow The escapement mechanism The exploding cannonball The fire arrow Firearms Fireworks (not Adobe Fireworks, the real thing) Gun powder The horse collar Hulk compartments/Bulkheads The kite Land mines The lottery Noodles Paper The pound lock Woodblock printing and movable type The multistate rocket The rudder The sailing carriage The seismometer Silk (ok, technically they didn’t INVENT it, but you get the point…) The sluice gate Stirrups The toothbrush Toilet paper The trebuchet The trip Hammer The wig The wheelbarrow The winnowing machine And here are some inventions that, according to Wikipedia, “are considered by various authors to have been first discovered, discovered contemporaneously with other civilizations, discovered separately after other civilizations, or simply used by the Chinese:” The abacus (first appearance: Mesopotamia, 2400 BC. First certain appearance in China: 12th century AD) – Is it just me, or is this a pretty huge difference in time??? Armillary sphere (invented by the Greek Eratosthenes), with the world’s first water-powered armillary sphere by Zhang Heng Various automata Bellows The compass (wet and dry) Camera obscura The cannon Chain pumps Crossbows Drydocks Flamethrowers Flash locks Early explosive grenades The Odometer (also by Archimedes and Heron of Alexandria) Paddle wheels for boats Paper money Parachutes Pontoon bridges Porcelain The postal system The saw Segmental arch bridges Star catalogues Tea Teeth (I’m pretty sure this one doesn’t belong on the list, guys) Collapsible umbrellas Vaccinations The water clock The water wheel (also of Greco-Roman tradition) Windmills

But besides that, what did they ever do for us?

reply to post by Tribunal

And! Whisky

:2nd 3rd 4th

reply to post by Phoenix267

Can someone with much more knowledge of what this number means please put it into perspective. Thanks. Any symbol or metaphor will do.

And when will the new techs being developed - graphene, quantum, etc. - make the 54.9 petaflop computer look like a wind-up toy?

reply to post by Aleister

Can someone with much more knowledge of what this number means please put it into perspective. Thanks. Any symbol or metaphor will do.

It's like 4 stadiums filled to the top with flops. If you would line up the flops you could circle the Earth 3.5 times.

Olympic pools.

I agree with Hounddog howlie............Im sure they stole it.........as for the list of chinese inventions, showing what they have done for us..Kind of a weird way to put it...anyways I have no idea where we would be today if it wasnt for the repeating crossbow........good lord

reply to post by Phoenix267


Americas fastest computer called the Titan Supercomputer is only 20 Petaflops. Not as fast as Chinas supercomputer but it looks pretty impressive.

Titan SuperComputer

reply to post by fugazzi777

anyways I have no idea

No, you didn't get the movie reference and the fact that it was just a joke to show that the Chinese were inventing their own stuff before there ever was such a country named America to make statements about the Chinese from.

Originally posted by hounddoghowlie
i wonder who china stole the design for this computer from?
they stole everything else they make.

Didnt have to steal it they bought it from intel, And who said making cheap imports doesn't pay off.

Originally posted by Aleister
reply to post by Phoenix267

 

Can someone with much more knowledge of what this number means please put it into perspective. Thanks. Any symbol or metaphor will do.

The scientific: A Flop is floating operations per second -- or how fast a computer is able to compute information. In electronic terms, how many transistors can it flip-flop from 1 to 0 to perform calculations.

Your computer you are using right now is at around 10 gigaFlops. or 10 billion (10,000,000,000) addition problems a second.

-- In contrast --

54.9 petaflops; is like you doing 55 quadrillion (54,000,000,000,000,000) addition problems a second.

Originally posted by Aleister
reply to post by Phoenix267

 

Can someone with much more knowledge of what this number means please put it into perspective. Thanks. Any symbol or metaphor will do.

And when will the new techs being developed - graphene, quantum, etc. - make the 54.9 petaflop computer look like a wind-up toy?

FLOPs means floating point operations per second. So what it's telling you is how many floating point calculations it can do.

A gigaflop is a billion floating point operations (add, subtract). A GTX Titan video card can do about 4500 billion FLOPs, or 4.5 teraflops.

A petaflop is 1000 teraflops. So, you could gang about 250 GTX Titan cards (or the equivalent) and get to 1 petaflop.

54.9 times that and Bob's your uncle.

You get that sort of performance out of what you call a vector processor. That's not a general purpose processor, though, the sort that you have in your laptop. It's for crunching numbers and not a lot more.

It should be noted that there are other ways to do a LOT of vector processing that don't involve microprocessors or graphics parts. One way is by the use of holographic lenses, for instance. Again, it's not the sort of thing you use to run Call of Duty. Back in about 2002 we built a holographic vector processor that was clocking out at about 30 teraflops, it would fit in a couple of shoe boxes (it went in an advanced 'aircraft') so the lens apertures were small, which limited the throughput. It's good for what it's good for, I suppose, but again, it's not for general purpose processing.

Nice newspiece. It always creates a good feeling when finances are used for something worthy

Alone such computer is not likely to give that much to science though. China will be asked for co-operation much more because of this.

Very advanced calculations often require using several supercomputers simultanously around the world simultanously in order to be efficient. It is pointless, when one supercomputer spends a month doing only one test. Instead several are used at once, so the test can be performed in a matter of days, so there would be more time for .less-time consuming calculations.

Originally posted by Aleister
reply to post by Phoenix267

 

Can someone with much more knowledge of what this number means please put it into perspective. Thanks. Any symbol or metaphor will do.

And when will the new techs being developed - graphene, quantum, etc. - make the 54.9 petaflop computer look like a wind-up toy?

Flops are floating point operations in basic terms how many operations it can handle per second.
niw lets see if i can help you lets start with a my desktop Core i7 980 XE, is capable of 109 gigaflops.

Name FLOPS
yottaFLOPS 1000000000000000000000000
zettaFLOPS 1000000000000000000000
exaFLOPS 1000000000000000000
petaFLOPS 1000000000000000
teraFLOPS 1000000000000
gigaFLOPS 1000000000
megaFLOPS 1000000
kiloFLOPS 1000


so my desktop can handle 1000000009 operations per second.will just call it 1 gigaflop for math sake dont want to figure out the math.So to get the equivalent of the chinese computer we need 54,900,000 of my desktop all linked to gether and working. hope that helps.

Woopy doo. Can the computer Barbecue spareribs or make American fries?

Thanks everyone. I just came back to this thread and saw all the good explanations and examples, and stars to 'em all. A thought just came upon me like a soft kitten jumping from a great height: with so much computing power available to everyone now why can't a someone come up with a good, accurate, and fast translator program so people who, for example, only write and read one of the forms of Chinese can converse and understand everything written on ATS perfectly. And vica versa. Since ATS is limited to just English-writing and reading users, we miss out on the vast knowledge available from writers only proficient in other languages. Put those petaflops to work, China, and get the perfect and instant translator perfected and available to all.