Monday 10 June 2013

China supercomputer to be world's fastest (again) - Tianhe-2

It seems that China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer will confirmed as the world's fastest supercomputer at next Top500 list to be revealed at the ISC'13 conference next week.

I was going to write about the Chinese Tianhe-2 supercomputer and how it matters to the USA and Europe - then I found these old blog posts of mine:




Those old posts seem strangely relevant to the current situation too! So in the interests of being "green" and adopting recycling, rather than write a full new post and waste all those electrons, I simply suggest you re-read the old posts!

Some excerpts to keep the non-recyclers happy:

"... the world's fastest supercomputer, in itself, is not world changing. But leading supercomputers, critically matched with appropriate expertise in programming and using them, togther with the vision to ensure use across basic research, industry and defence applications can indeed be strategically beneficial to a nation - including real economic impact."

"... news of China's investment in hardware, software and people (and stated ambition of independence of supply) should make a clear message to USA, Europe and others that they cannot rely on their continued leadership of HPC. And thus the economic benefits of HPC might soon be driving Chinese growth rather than the European or American economies."

"... our obsession with "protecting our investment" in established applications, means we first have to figure out how to get from yesterday's software technology to current methods, then to the future. Is 'protecting our investment' actually constraining our future?"

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