
China is now home to some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers - nopinsight
https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2018/03/daily-chart-12
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seanmcdirmid
China admits it is having trouble writing software to run on these computers.
See:

[http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1094092.shtml](http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1094092.shtml)

The other issue, I guess, is that the west decided this was just a pissing
context not worth playing. Heck, when I was in grad school (U of Utah) they
would out the SGI supercomputer they had together to do world rating
benchmarks and then promptly divide it afterwards into multiple computers
because it wasn’t very useful in that mode. If you are simulating your nuclear
explosions well enough already, the demand for ever faster super computers
simply isn’t there when a cluster of GPUs will give you much better bang for
the buck for newer tasks like machine learning.

~~~
fspeech
Part of the reason is likely a lack of true demands, like the example you
gave. BAT have shown that they don't lack talents to run computing
infrastructure. However they probably don't have enough properly funded long
term basic research projects that truly require HPC.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
HPC != super computer, and hasn’t for 10+ years now. Just like mainframes (for
most tasks) have been replaced by clusters, so have super computers (for most
tasks).

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sqdbps
This needs to come with an asterix: profiles of the rise of the Chinese tech
industry or its supposed move from "imitation to innovation” often forgo how
Chinese companies are entirely protected from foreign competition in their
domestic market and that the Chinese government is forcing foreign companies
wanting to do business there to share intellectual property with Chinese
competitors.

It's a story about unsavory government behavior going unchecked not about
private industry achievement.

~~~
chrischen
Aka their protectionism is doing exactly what it was intended to do.

~~~
fspeech
Those who complain that nothing has been done about China seem to be unaware
of export control, Wassenaar Arrangement and CFIUS.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Which are exceptionally narrow and target too narrow of technologies to make
much difference from a GDP perspective.

I used to work CFIUS issues for the DoD and can tell you that the government
preventing tech from being exported when both parties (developer and acquirer)
want to share basically never happens.

~~~
fspeech
Governments think of technology as products, but of course it is people that
possess knowledge. Unless you cut off connections amongst people, eventually
knowledge will diffuse.

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gourou
When Obama banned Intel from selling chips to China, it was assumed it would
take years for them to catch up. They invested heavily in research and built
their own to occupy spots #1 and #2 on TOP500. They also plan on building only
ARM-based supercomputers in the future.

[https://www.pcworld.com/article/2908692/us-blocks-intel-
from...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/2908692/us-blocks-intel-from-selling-
xeon-chips-to-chinese-supercomputer-projects.html)

[https://www.computerworld.com/article/3085483/high-
performan...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/3085483/high-performance-
computing/china-builds-world-s-fastest-supercomputer-without-u-s-chips.html)

------
netheril96
One thing important to Chinese is that the Sunway supercomputer uses entirely
China-made CPUs. While these CPUs may never outcompete Intel or ARM in a
commercial market, they could be used in computers of the military, nuclear
stations and other critical infrastructure. China will then be the sole
country free from the threat of US mandated backdoors in CPUs.

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dalu
OT: When ever I read "cyber" I think "2 guys pretending to be girls doing
cybersex in a MMORPG" ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
droidist2
I think of old school AOL chat rooms. "a/s/l" "wanna cyber?"

------
nopinsight
More charts and a more detailed writeup here:
[https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21738903-blocking-
br...](https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21738903-blocking-broadcoms-
takeover-qualcomm-donald-trump-showed-america-worried-about)

This might be a key factor in the drastic rise. China is annually graduating
about 8 times as many STEM degree holders as the US, as of 2016:

"...In 2013, 40 percent of Chinese graduates finished a degree in STEM, over
twice the share in American third level institutions."

"The World Economic Forum reported that China had 4.7 million recent STEM
graduates in 2016. India, another academic powerhouse, had 2.6 million new
STEM graduates last year while the U.S. had 568,000."

Source: The Countries With The Most STEM Graduates [Infographic]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/02/02/the-
co...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/02/02/the-countries-
with-the-most-stem-graduates-infographic/#4d9a3f35268a)

~~~
adventured
The key factor is that US cloud systems are not being included in
supercomputing calculations at all. The most powerful supercomputers are
Amazon's AWS or Google's systems. Alibaba's cloud systems are still tiny by
comparison.

Cloud compute systems are the next evolution of supercomputing. Or put a
better way, the traditional supercomputers being measured, are history.

It'd be like holding up 56k modem market leadership today as a sign of
technological dominance.

~~~
nopinsight
The point of the chart is that the rise in China's tech capabilities is quite
broad-based. The tagline about supercomputers is just an illustration for non-
tech readers.

Quantum communications and certain NLP applications/technologies are some
areas that China has likely surpassed the US. These are definitely not
comparable to 56k modem.

~~~
adventured
There's zero evidence China has surpassed the US in quantum. In fact _all_ the
evidence is that the US is leading quantum by a significant margin, from IBM
to Microsoft to Google. Your NLP reference is meaninglessly vague.

Traditional supercomputers, except in isolated use cases, are a thing of the
past. Nearly all supercomputing work will be done in the cloud in the not very
distant future, supercomputing will continue to shrink.

China's use of supercomputing is because on the whole they're still a decade
behind on adopting cloud computing (which is why Alibaba, their leader in the
segment, has such a small business compared to the US cloud giants).

~~~
nopinsight
Quantum communications, not quantum computers.
[https://www.insidescience.org/news/china-leader-quantum-
comm...](https://www.insidescience.org/news/china-leader-quantum-
communications)

You can search ‘quantum communications china’ for more references.

For NLP research: [https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-
explorer/](https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/). See the teams behind
top algorithms.

For real-world NLP: Xiaoyi (Little Doctor) was the first (and currently the
only) AI that passed a medical licensing exam that human doctors need to pass
(and rote learning is not enough to pass):
[http://sites.ieee.org/futuredirections/2017/12/02/congrats-x...](http://sites.ieee.org/futuredirections/2017/12/02/congrats-
xiaoyi-you-are-now-a-medical-doctor/)

------
rwmj
Does anyone know more about the Chinese "Sunway" chips used in the TaihuLight?
The wikipedia description sounds really interesting, sort of like the old
Transputer.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SW26010](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SW26010)

~~~
tyingq
Here's a pretty detailed write-up:
[http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-...](http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/sunway-
report-2016.pdf)

~~~
rwmj
It looks difficult to code for (although the paper mentions they have their
own parallelizing compiler & have successfully compiled several real
applications).

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baybal2
It is poorly understood that the strategy in Chinese side is set to position
their industry orthogonal to global economy/markets.

They take upon something niche and obscure, but with great promise to give
tons of offshoot tech and give breakthrough boosts to existing industry:
renewable energy, batteries, rare earth metals, FPGAs, lights-off factories at
scale... etc...

They play quiet for few years, before quickly locking down everything when
there is zero change anybody catching up to Chinese companies.

Chicoms manage their economy as a single Japanese style conglomerate.

See how it went with renewable, China has a lockdown on the tech,

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fwdpropaganda
What happened, HN? Even 3-4 years ago all you would read about China on HN is
that they don't really create anything, they just copy America...

~~~
verylittlemeat
Why are you baiting another pointless US vs China nationalism faceoff?

China has had a huge population and economy for decades. Almost by definition
they will play an important role in the future of the internet. Anyone who
said otherwise was wrong then and is wrong now.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
> Why are you baiting another pointless US vs China nationalism faceoff?

That was not my intention. Instead, my implication was that the dismissal of
China's progress that you see in HN was entirely motivated by nationalism, not
objective analysis of the facts. If you were trying to objectively analyze of
the facts the rational conclusion should be "this is really complex, who knows
how it's going to turn out."

~~~
rtx
People would discuss facts if China was more open.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
Are there some facts that you'd like access to that you don't? Give me
specifics.

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jcranmer
The measurement basis of TOP500 is effectively how good you are at solving a
dense LU factorization of a matrix. This is a metric that is really easy to
game, since the computation/communication ratio is very high (at least linear
in problem size).

What I've heard is that most of the Chinese supercomputers do really well on
the LINPACK benchmark and rather much more poorly on real workloads.

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ashleyn
Mr. Robot wasn't bullshitting.

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jaywcjlove
oh

