Extremely impressive accomplishment considering they did this with Chinese interconnects and Chinese chips. This is a wake up call.
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TOP500 can be done with inexpensive silicon. It is more about a willingness to aggregate enough hardware in one place. As a benchmark, it tells you almost nothing about computing power or scalability for other applications because it doesn't exercise the bottlenecks most high-scale applications have.
> TOP500 can be done with inexpensive silicon.
Didn't the DoD at one point build a 1k+ PS3 cluster based on their multi-core chip and had a mini supercomputer CotS?
I remember Sony not liking that people were buying them for other things rather than gaming (iirc they were losing money on hardware at the time) so they bricked linux support soon after.
> Didn't the DoD at one point build a 1k+ PS3 cluster based on their multi-core chip and had a mini supercomputer CotS?
The Air Force did (Condor) and it hit #33 on the 2010 Top500.
The PS3 was sold at a loss, so their numbers are skewed.
Not the first time that happened, even for China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fastest_computers
This is quite different.
The last time when China had the fastest supercomputer, it was more than 20 times slower than this one and more than 8 times less efficient in energy consumption.
Moreover, its capability was overestimated by the Linpack benchmarks and in other workloads its performance was much less impressive.
For this system, it is the opposite situation. Its result in Top500 underestimates it capability. In other more demanding workloads, where the influence of the memory bandwidth and latency is stronger, its advantage over the US supercomputers is greater than in Top500.
It's the same. Nobody was buying POWER9 or A64FX systems, and manufacturers of those are no factor to anything.
One could theoretically drive home with a ready-to-go rack of non-American and/or non-x86 supercomputer nodes at any point in time across the last few decades, sometimes even with non-NVIDIA/AMD massively parallel coprocessor cards. Nobody did.
If China(or any country) would _ship_ these alternative supercomputer hardware, only then anything could change.
We're too busy regulating the tech, not granting access to US engineers and companies, arguing against power and data centers, stopping skilled immigration.
This is absolutely going to bite us in the face in five to ten years.
Separate issue that has nothing to do with US manufacturing or HPC. I think our retreat from science funding and offshoring advanced manufacturing is a bigger issue.