China suddenly has way more of the world’s most powerful computers than the US

https://qz.com/1128704/china-has-way-more-of-the-worlds-most-powerful-computers-than-the-us/

by fspeech • 9 years ago

48 48 9 years ago

dingo_bat• 9 years ago

More interesting would be to find out what exactly they are doing with all that power.

fspeech3• 9 years ago

If you go down the list https://www.top500.org/list/2017/11/?page=2, after about 100th place, many are listed as "web service providers" or "service providers" or "internet companies".

alvis• 9 years ago

probably many of them are bit coin miners.

Kyragem• 9 years ago

Because China doesn't believe in God but in Science. In the US we rather subsidize churches to the tune of $70B a year than to invest in computing infrastructure.

gscott4• 9 years ago

Churches provide services to communities far exceeding 70 billion. Trying to judge churches on what some fringe groups and politicians do is short-sighted.

civilitty• 9 years ago

We're talking about the United States so that's at least a third of the electorate, one that has an over sized influence on politics due to a combination of gerrymandering and voter suppression. These aren't some "fringe groups and politicians" but the prevailing religious ideology of the party in power across all three branches of governments.

The American protestant churches are to Christianity what the Society of Saint Pius X is to the Roman Catholic Church and it's a big enough group of people that it can stand judgement on its own.

As for the services churches provide - the whole point of taxes is pooling capital that the government can use to more efficiently provide far better services to its constituents than any non-governmental organization can. If the churches were actually capable of providing those services beyond largely superficial displays of charity and piety, we wouldn't need government to begin with.

_lbaq• 9 years ago

That service should be provided by the government, not a privileged special interest group.

lordfoom• 9 years ago

Churches provide services to communities far exceeding 70 billion.

Nah.

Invictus0• 9 years ago

Yeah, as if China spends every dime efficiently... Their Great Firewall and associated censorship likely adds up to tens of billions per year.

pjmlp2• 9 years ago

And they even sign the climate agreements.

adventured2• 9 years ago

While producing three times the CO2 output per dollar of GDP that the US does, with no intention of slowing their CO2 growth at all. Quite the accomplishment, signing some agreements that hold them accountable to nothing, while the US is actually reducing its CO2 emissions by abandoning coal.

tete2• 9 years ago

On the government level, maybe. On the overall population it's interesting. Many people don't consider themselves religious, when they do practice rituals to please gods. I however am not sure how much of this is tradition and habit, vs believing.

Nevertheless, I found it interesting how practicing "Chinese folk religion" and still calling yourself an atheist seems to not really raise eyebrows.

It would be interesting to hear of someone having more insight, as I only got this off the internet.

tmalsburg2• 9 years ago

Atheism means literally "no god-ism", and since there are religious belief systems that don't involve gods, there is not necessarily a contradiction here.

odiroot• 9 years ago

China, as you so easily collectively defined, believes in million things; not better and not worse than US believers.

Yours is really an useless argument. This is more about consolidation of power.

thejosh• 9 years ago

Yeah, its citizens are free to do what they please, right.

lin_lin3• 9 years ago

Hilarious shoe-horning in of your personal gripe. When was the vote to decide between computing funding and religious stuff?

wellboy• 9 years ago

If the $70B werent used for the church it would be used for other things, including supercomputing. His statement has some weight.

ssijak• 9 years ago

Well, you also have Kathleen Hartnett White as the new head of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality who majored in religion and is global warming denier.

And many other.

adventured2• 9 years ago

China is extremely mystical in fact.

If you had spent any time there, or knew anything about their culture, you'd already understand that. It's not uncommon, it's completely widspread throughout their society.

See: their cultural obsessions with numerology, superstitions, fate, luck, etc.

sremani• 9 years ago

Intel, AMD, Nvidia are American companies, I certainly do not see what believing God has to do with Chinese computing. Do you know that Issac Newton spent a third of his time trying to decipher "secrets" and prophecies of bible?

God or Science is a false choice, its usually propagated by people who know price of everything and value of nothing!

komaromy• 9 years ago

China’s president Xi Jinping recently said the country is “taking a driving seat” in fighting climate change

One of the only things giving me hope right now.

PostOnce• 9 years ago

https://www.top500.org/green500/lists/2017/11/

There's also a Green500 list of most performance-per-watt, i.e. greenest, most efficient computers, and Japan is the clear leader there.

saas_co_de• 9 years ago

taking a driving seat

That is pretty funny actually. China is planning to lead the world in electric car manufacturing, where they have some big natural advantages, which they hope will get them into a competitive position in the international automotive market.

They are already leading the world on solar.

narrator• 9 years ago

Ironic part is we denied them Nvidia chips so they built their own supercomputer chips.

sddfd• 9 years ago

Don't know if that is the reason, but China can build super computers without US parts now.

gscott4• 9 years ago

China made a huge investment in AMD a year or two ago.

singularity2001• 9 years ago

intersting, can you order and use them for regular machine learning projects? always looking for ways to escape the nvidia monopoly.

ino• 9 years ago

And intel.

read the first 3 paragraphs on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2

fspeech3• 9 years ago

China's increase of 42 systems on Top500 is largely attributable to a single company. Chinese "internet company A" (as labelled by Top500 https://www.top500.org/site/50596) is presumably Alibaba, judging from its residence city of Hangzhou. It alone counts for 35 new machines on the list since June! (Click on the history tab to see the number for yourself.) I wonder if they are part of Alibaba's cloud services or for internal uses. Either way presumably Alibaba sees commercial value in owning them.

fspeech3• 9 years ago

On closer inspection I have to say that I am a bit confused by these rankings. It appears that Inspur (a Chinese HPC company listed as the vendor for Alibaba's systems) lists its product as rack scale servers. By that standard what is to keep any data center operator from claiming a top spot on the list? Is it because Inspur systems can be configured to run Linpack benchmark as clusters? Alibaba's published use case http://www.inspursystems.com/case-studies/alibaba/ does not seem particularly floating point intensive, so the distinction seems somewhat artificial.

gresrun• 9 years ago

It’s also rather misleading since the majority of computing resources in the US are in “cloud” data centers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.) and they never bother to take the time to run Linpack on their clusters because making $$ is more important. I would wager Google’s compute cells alone would constitute a few dozen slots in the top 100.

danmaz74• 9 years ago

Yes, it would be interesting to learn what are they used for.

hoodoof2• 9 years ago

The implication is that computing power has some inherent value, like a country should stockpile it or something.

Retric• 9 years ago

Much like electricity generation, unused computing power is useless but capacity is very useful and tends to be consumed.

hoodoof2• 9 years ago

Yeah but there's no "computing race" in which countries compete to have more computing power than the next, despite the implication of articles like this that hint such a race would be important.

Makes not the slightest difference who has computing power. Its relevant only if you have reason to use it, and even then might be completely pointless.

Gave me 100 Cray Y-MP computers and I can't think of a damn thing to do with them. Countries are no different. Giving a country 100Mflops gives it nothing over the next country without 100Mflops.

BUT what I would absolutely say is true is that politicians - those great scum suckers at the bottom of the human pyramid - are highly likely to believe that it is VERY important that a country does not get left behind in its supercomputing power. Fuckwits. This is the sort of article that would send politicians racing to spend government money on state run supercomputing facilities which do..... nothing of any REAL value.

lostboys672• 9 years ago

Is this counting "black" systems or not :-) ie those run by TLA's defence etc and never avowed

China suddenly has way more of the world’s most powerful computers than the US

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