Chinese Supercomputer Now Fastest on Earth(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
Chinese Supercomputer Now Fastest on Earth
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/technology/28compute.html?hp
6 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 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.
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.
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...
"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.
can perform mathematical operations about 29 million times
faster than one of the earliest supercomputers, built in
1976.