Over at The Register, Timothy Prickett Morgan looks at the details of the new Tianhe-2 Chinese supercomputer that is poised to lead the TOP500. And while some might dismiss this system as a stunt machine for bragging rights, Morgan contends that the Chinese are just getting warmed up.
The Tianhe-1A and Tianhe-2 machines built by China are really about designing and testing the homegrown “Arch” interconnect and getting experience in massively parallel applications on the way to building a completely indigenous machine. As long as China has the cash, it can buy development time for its fledgling chip industry by using processors and coprocessors from American suppliers. It can take as much time as it needs to, but the big fear in the U S of A is that China will create a complete supercomputing stack and want to sell it here and in Europe. How do you say no to a country that you owe $2 trillion to?
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