

Is The Chinese Supercomputer Our Sputnik? - tmckd
http://www.macdougherty.com/macblog/2010/10/is-the-chinese-supercomputer-our-sputnik.html

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jlouis
The article is wrong on " The fastest supercomputer has, since 1994, resided
in the United States at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where it is used
for scientific computing, among other purposes."

I present to the thee, the Japanese Earth Simulator:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Simulator>

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dotBen
Asks an American tax payer: Why does America need to have the fastest super-
computer? _(the premis of this and other coverage of this topic)_

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ihumanable
I think the article is making the argument that the goal of having the fastest
X or the biggest X or being the first to X is not the point. Supercomputers
have real value, in the sense that they are used to solve real problems that
can't be solved otherwise. The bigger point seems to be that the benefit in
getting to X is that you normally create a lot of technology that ends up
being beneficial to the economy in general.

Having an uninterruptable communication network led to the internet. Being
able to deploy ICBMs across the nation led to the Highway System. Going to
space created a ton of new materials and manufacturing systems that have
created products that couldn't have existed before.

Having the fastest supercomputer is the trees, the forest is the wealth of
technology and industries born out of that race.

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dotBen
_Supercomputers have real value, in the sense that they are used to solve real
problems that can't be solved otherwise_

Sure, and this answers the question "why have super-computers", indeed, the US
has several.

I'm not just sure if any of the reasons you specify, all valid, suddenly
become invalid when there is simply a delta between the power of US vs China
systems.

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nkassis
There was an article posted here on HN not too long ago about Japan's 5th
generation computer project. It was more about what killed logic programming
but this China+supercomputing thing reminds me of this a little.

Here's the article: <http://vanemden.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/who-killed-
prolog/>

EDIT: Wikipedia page about the project:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer>

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thelema314
The Chinese CPU is junk, and the chinese supercomputer is built out of US
parts - I wouldn't be too apocalyptic about technological superiority for some
years yet.

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jlouis
The CPUs are just a commodity. The interconnect is where it is at.

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heresy
Until the interconnect is a commodity, and at any point the advances they've
made there can be as easily utilized in building new US supercomputers.

I don't really see the point of this chest thumping, whoever does it, it just
seems like so much posturing. It's fast. Great, but get back to actual science
please.

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fhe
this reads like what the Japanese did in WWII: racing to build the largest
battleship when naval warfare had shifted to carriers and airplanes
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_battleship_Yamato>).

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InclinedPlane
To be fair, they also built a crap-ton of carriers and airplanes.

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hga
To be even more fair, so did we, since neither of us _knew_ ahead of time
which or what mix would prove decisive.

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Tichy
"Supercomputing is at the basis of many important scientific and commercial
enterprises in the United States, and it is very important that we not
relinquish our lead in this area."

Details, please. Otherwise it is just blubbering.

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possibilistic
I'm studying to become an interdiciplinary computational biochemist, so
perhaps I can lend some perspective.

Supercomputers are increasingly used in the sciences to scale down the search
space of massively complicated problems such as protein folding, molecular
docking, and chemical synthesis. In several instances they lead us to novel,
non-intuitive results, sometimes as small as finding a functional group
prefering a gauched vs anti conformation that changes a particular interaction
completely. With drug design specifically, we can cut down the chemical search
space necessary to find inhibitor molecules and search for potential
problematic harmful interactions before ever running in vitro assays.

Science today is more serendipity and hard work than acts of sheer brilliance.
Having high-throughput tools that save us from looking too hard give us more
time to think and more quickly update our models.

Supercomputing will lead us to smarter medicine, cures for cancer, better
materials, and a more energy-efficient planet. Computer science is a major
cornerstone of today's scientific endeavors, and we increasingly need to
encourage interest and investment in this field.

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adaml_623
Such a sad US vs THEM post.

Americans are just going to have to accept that the playing field is becoming
more level and eventually a country with 1 Billion people is going to be more
productive than a country with 300 Million people. It's just arithmetic.

And it's not the end of the world. It's ok to just live in a country and have
a cool life.

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gaius
How do you figure that? The size of a country's population is nothing to do
with anything, really. History is full of examples.

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garply
That's good to point out, but China is consciously adopting a Western legal
and economic system (with some notable modifications) on which to run its
society. If they do it successfully, the larger amount of people should give
the country a greater amount of productivity than the US.

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gaius
That's a very fine balancing act. Everything is magnified. What if 10%
unemployment in the US economy at an equivalent tech level translates to 60%
in China? Perhaps the Chinese will choose to keep productivity at a controlled
level to prevent social unrest.

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CamperBob
No. That'll happen when the Chinese reach the Moon.

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ximeng
In 2013: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_3>

