IBM Warns that China is Closing the Supercomputer Gap

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Under construction: Chinas massive new supercomputing center site in Shenzhen.

Under construction: China's massive new supercomputing center site in Shenzhen.

This week David Turek, IBM’s vice president of deep computing issued a warning that China and other nations are closing the supercomputing gap.

You have sovereign nations making material investments of a tremendous magnitude to basically eat our lunch, eat our collective lunch,” Turek said. “Within a year, there will be more TOP500 systems in China than there are in Europe collectively.”

While the TOP500 may seem to many like some kind of chest-beating kabuki theater, these numbers matter. See that big hole in the ground in the picture? If that future datacenter was somehow found to be a threat to national security someday, I’m thinking the before and after photos would look pretty much the same.

Comments

  1. Nice fearmongering. It’s uncalled for to insinuate that we would have a reason to bomb this.

  2. China is definitely committed to technology leadership – the Exascale Report has been referring to this – even with some anonymous quotes from folks in China – for several months now.

  3. > Nice fearmongering.
    Yup. And IBM knows how to play this game better than anyone else. Being flooded with cash by Congress is one way to recoup the losses made while advancing the Science of Linpack.

    Let’s make a case for 1 exascale machine instead of distributing 1000 petaflop machines across the country. Surely 1 person can solve that one “EXA” problem better than 1000 different people tackling big enough PETA problems.

    HPC is pathetic.

  4. Well with this 1 exascale machine you can solve that one “EXA” problem _and_ tackle the 1000 PETA problems 🙂