On 07/02/2014 05:21 PM, "C. Bergström" wrote:
On 07/ 3/14 04:17 AM, Jeff Johnson wrote:
If they want to spend a bazillion dollars to run hpl faster than anyone
else who am I to stop them.
If however they want to do real science perhaps they need to architect
something more manageable.
They should bust that thing up into 3 or 4 clusters.
On 7/2/14, 2:11 PM, Douglas Eadline wrote:
China's world-beating supercomputer fails to impress some potential
clients
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1543226/chinas-world-beating-supercomputer-fails-imp
replied too fast the above link gets cut
So paste "ress-some-potential-clients" at the end or here it is again
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1543226/chinas-world-beating-supercomputer-fails-impress-some-potential-clients
Ahhhh.. that's much better. Disregard my earlier e-mail about the page
not found error. Didn't look closely enough to see the original link was
broken.
I know I'm late to this party, and haven't read through the 20+ e-mails
on this topic, but here's my initial thoughts:
Sadly, this is not entirely surprising. Shortly after the K Computer
went into production, Japanese scientists made statements that the K
computer was great for LINPACK scores, but was underperforming (relative
to LINPACK result) on actual applications they were trying to run on the
K. I tried searching for the article I read on this a few years ago, but
couldn't find it. Please excuse my last of citation.
Regarding China specifically, several years ago, I attended a lecture by
Bill Tang from Princeton University. He had just come back from China,
where he met with their computational scientists, and was sharing what
he learned there. According to his lecture, China acknowledged that
despite their advances on the hardware side, China was still way behind
the rest of the world on the software side, and it would be years before
they could catch up, which sounds like one of the contributing factors
to this situation.
It's hard to fault China for building this system, though. If China
wants to become an HPC superpower, they need systems like this they can
practice on and learn from. Yes, the 'tuition' is quite expensive, but
learning by doing (and making mistakes along the way) is a proven
learning technique.
What's shocking is the business model. Didn't anyone do a business
feasibility study? I would have thought the government would be
subsidizing it's operation to help foster the learning I mentioned in
the previous paragraph.
Prentice
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