Chinese Tianhe-1A Supercomputer Starts Churning Out the Science

"The US really needs to up its investment in high performance computing."

Really? Well let's have a look at the top500 list shall we? Now while Linpack leaves some things to be desired (like the fact that clusters perform better on it than they can on some things like particle simulation) but it is the standard.

So of the top 10 system 5, half, are in the US. #2, 5, 7, 8 and 10 are US computers. The next 10? 7 of them in the US. So 12 of the top 20 are US systems. Most of them are US government systems too, and the ones that aren't are university. So not like "Big companies that happen to be in the US," but research universities and government research agencies like the DOE and so on.

It also isn't stopping. The Advanced Simulation & Computing Program (formerly ASCI) is going on and more computers are being built. LANL has chosen Cray to build the next one, Cielo. It is partially complete and online now, though still being added to. Currently #10 on the list, it will move up a bit when it is complete.

So I don't see the US as not investing in this.

What I see them not doing is buying nVidia GPU based systems, which is fine. GPUs are neat and all but they are not as general purpose as CPUs. They are stream processors. Now if your project is one that stream processors are good at then great. However not all projects are. Particle simulation, that I mentioned before, is one that stream processors aren't so good at. So just because something is higher on the Linpack based top500, doesn't mean it is faster at everything.

Regardless, it isn't like the US needs to be on the number 1 spot to be good. The more telling fact is how many are there, that the US has over half of the systems in the top 20. Clearly supercomputers are something the US has plenty of. Keep going down the list and you keep seeing a lot of US systems.

This is just nVidia trying to play on the whole patriotism thing to make sales.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/to/~3/r7JmJf13JhU/Chinese-Tianhe-1A-Supercomputer-Starts-Churning-Out-the-Science

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