China's Super Computer WJS

The   WJS article  By Bob Davis with title "China's Not-So-Supr Computers" Key Points:

• Nebulae  星雲 National Supercomputing Center (Shenzhen) in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.
• Use of SC is determine by local politicians not the breakthrough technology
• SW development project is under founded
• catch up with USA on health care  to automotive design to aviation
• The strategy: never to lead but to follow"
• researchers are rewarded according to the number of academic papers they publish rather than the quality and novelty of their work
•  The battle for software dollars is so intense in China that researchers rarely work as a team on long-term software projects

HPC wire follow up with title "Is Chinese SC a Paper Tigers?" By Robert Geiber

• Takeaway
  Davis paints a picture of China that shows a far less competitive HPC industry than their hardware prowess may suggest. However, this doesn’t mean the country is uncompetitive. China has 74 computers on the Top500 list and is the second highest investor of HPC in the world. Changes in how that money is spent could make the country a much more formidable supercomputing power.

 INQUIRER by Nebojsa Novakovic title "China's SC are super, just not all of them"

Yes, China has less experience than the USA, Europe or Japan in coding software for large machines like this, but they are learning fast. So, they disagree with the WSJ's suggestion that software 'maturity' will remain a problem, since they are gaining ground there by leaps and bounds

Source: The Inquirer (http://s.tt/18vj3)

• Yes, China has less experience than the USA, Europe or Japan in coding software for large machines like this, but they are learning fast. So, they disagree with the WSJ's suggestion that software 'maturity' will remain a problem, since they are gaining ground there by leaps and bounds

  Source: The Inquirer (http://s.tt/18vj3)

Yes, China has less experience than the USA, Europe or Japan in coding software for large machines like this, but they are learning fast. So, they disagree with the WSJ's suggestion that software 'maturity' will remain a problem, since they are gaining ground there by leaps and bounds

• By the end of 2014, China will have at least three 100PFLOP machines that I know of installed - one each in the brand new supercomputer centres of Guangzhou, Changsha and Chongqing. The latter one, in the new industrial powerhouse city of 34 million in western China, where one fifth of all world's motorbikes and soon similar proportion of all laptops are made, will be fully based on Chinese 'Loongson' MIPS processors with massive SIMD extensions. That doesn't even cover what the northern provinces will have.

Yes, China has less experience than the USA, Europe or Japan in coding software for large machines like this, but they are learning fast. So, they disagree with the WSJ's suggestion that software 'maturity' will remain a problem, since they are gaining ground there by leaps and bounds

Source: The Inquirer (http://s.tt/18vj3)

Yes, China has less experience than the USA, Europe or Japan in coding software for large machines like this, but they are learning fast. So, they disagree with the WSJ's suggestion that software 'maturity' will remain a problem, since they are gaining ground there by leaps and bounds

Source: The Inquirer (http://s.tt/18vj3)

In summary, the WSJ article isn't right. China is rapidly maturing its supercomputing technology, especially from the hardware point of view, with its own Alpha, MIPS and SPARC processors, plus a dozen ARM licensees and a couple of its own advanced instruction set architectures out there as well, plus its own interconnects and I/O controllers. The Middle Kingdom can control its complete 'vertical stack' of hardware and avoid security risks or technological dependence on a potentially hostile foreign power.

• In summary, the WSJ article isn't right. China is rapidly maturing its supercomputing technology, especially from the hardware point of view, with its own Alpha, MIPS and SPARC processors, plus a dozen ARM licensees and a couple of its own advanced instruction set architectures out there as well, plus its own interconnects and I/O controllers. The Middle Kingdom can control its complete 'vertical stack' of hardware and avoid security risks or technological dependence on a potentially hostile foreign power.
• Also, there's nothing wrong in having 'mundane, every day' uses of supercomputers. For instance, a detailed traffic simulation of a gigantic city like that, where every person, vehicle and road, and their behavioural patterns, are fully simulated, can help save billions in correct positioning or construction of new highways or rail lines. Do all the supercomputers have to simulate nuclear bombs? I guess no, so in that sense the civilian use benefit of Chinese supercomputers is just fine.

 My Observations:

• HPC project is big money project from gov 
• all politics is local may be even more in China 
• key factors in HPC is to push CPU chip "made by china" some are licensed from MIPS and some copycat from alpha and from openSPARC
   
• China today does not yet has good Fab that can make 28, 22nm, but Taiwan does 
• Cloud will be part of the HPC project and become big in China and Taiwan 
• Yes today these HPC supercomputers are under utilized but if some one find a way to provide $$ to use these supercompuer (Just like USA NSF is doing it recently)
• there are many more research $$ wasted in the USA for user to build small/medium size HPC Supercomputer, but these center does train more Ph.D and postdoc that are from India and China and Russian etc
• hopefully China will find more usage of these Big Machines but it will take time 
• most trained Scientist still prefer to stay in USA for various reasons ,hope that they can help the China to use the Supercomputer more