Chinese take out U.S. in supercomputer ranking, named world's fastest

Chinese supercomputer named world's fastest

November 14, 2010

China overtook the United States at the head of the world of supercomputing on Sunday when a survey ranked one of its machines the fastest on the planet.
 

Tianhe-1, meaning Milky Way, achieved a computing speed of 2,570 trillion calculations per second, earning it the number one spot in the Top 500 (www.top500.org) survey of supercomputers.

The Jaguar computer at a US government facility in Tennessee, which had held the top spot, was ranked second with a speed of 1,750 trillion calculations per second.

Tianhe-1 does its warp-speed "thinking" at the National Centre for Supercomputing in the northern port city of Tianjin -- using mostly chips designed by US companies.

Another Chinese system, the Nebulae machine at the National Supercomputing Centre in the southern city of Shenzhen, came in third.

The United States still dominates, with more than half of the entries in the Top 500 list, but China now boasts 42 systems in the rankings, putting it ahead of Japan, France, Germany and Britain.

It is not the first time that the United States has had its digital crown stolen by an Asian upstart. In 2002, Japan made a machine with more power than the top 20 American computers put together.

The supercomputers on the Top 500 list, which is produced twice a year, are rated based on speed of performance in a benchmark test by experts from Germany and the United States.

More information: http://www.physorg … omputer.html
(c) 2010 AFP 

Watch Video

Play Video

 

A Chinese supercomputer has been ranked the world's fastest machine in a list issued by US and European researchers. The move highlights China's rapid progress in the field.

The Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, is capable of sustaining computation at 2.57 quadrillions of calculations per second. As a result, the former number one system -- the US Department of Energy's, Jaguar, in Oak Ridge, is now ranked second.

The third place is also held by a Chinese system called Nebulae, and it's located, at the National Supercomputing Center in south China's city of Shenzhen.

File photo of China's world-leading supercomputer, Tianhe-1A. (Xinhua File Photo)

Related Reading:
Chinese supercomputer ranked world's fastest
WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 14 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese supercomputer was ranked the world's fastest machine in a list issued Sunday by U.S. and European researchers, highlighting China 's rapid progress in the field. Detial >>
Highlights of TOP500 supercomputers
WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese supercomputer was ranked the world's fastest machine in the TOP500 list issued Sunday by U.S. and European researchers. The following are highlights of the list: Detail >>
Highlights of Top10 supercomputers
GTON, Nov. 14 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese supercomputer was ranked the world's fastest machine in a list issued Sunday by U.S. and European researchers. The following are highlights from the top 10 supercomputer in the list. Detail >>

Chinese take out U.S. in supercomputer ranking

The Jaguar has fallen from the top of the food chain.

When the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is released today, the Cray XT5 system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and run by the University of Tennessee, called "Jaguar," will drop to No. 2 after a year of eating the lunch of every other supercomputer in the world. In its place will stand Tianhe-1A, a system built by China's National University of Defense Technology, located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.

Tianhe-1A achieved a performance level of 2.67 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second). Jaguar achieved 1.75 petaflop/s. Third place went to another Chinese-built system, called Nebulae, which achieved 1.27 petaflop/s.

And while the news of China's achievement is not exactly a surprise, the supercomputing community in the U.S. is looking at it two ways: as both as an assurance that U.S. software and components are still elite in their field, and a wake-up call that the country's prestige in high-performance computing is not a given.

"This is what everybody expected. What the Chinese have done is they're exploiting the power of GPUs (graphic processing unit) which are...awfully close to being uniquely suited to this particular benchmark," said Bill Gropp, computer science professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, and co-principal investigator of the Blue Waters project, another supercomputer in the works.

The benchmark he's speaking of is the Linpack, which tests the performance of a system for solving a dense system of linear equations. It's measured in calculations or floating point operations per second, hence flop/s. Not everyone in this field agrees it's the best possible way to compare machines, but it is one way.

By using GPUs to accelerate the performance of the Tianhe-1A, the machine can achieve more floating point operations per second.

"The way most of us look at the Chinese machine, is it's very good at this particular problem (the Linpack benchmark), but not problems the user community is interested in," said Gropp.

For those worried that this is a blow to the United States' leadership in supercomputing, it's actually not a huge cause for alarm if you consider the provenance of the pieces of the Chinese system. Tianhe-1A is a Linux computer built from components from Intel and Nvidia, points out Charlie Zender, professor of Earth Systems Science at the University of California at Irvine.

A timeline of supercomputing speed. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: AMD)

 

"So we find ourselves admiring an achievement that certainly couldn't have been done without the know-how of Silicon Valley...and an operating system designed mostly by the United States and Europe," Zender said. "It's a time for reflection that we are now at a stage where a country that's motivated and has the resources can take off-the-shelf components and assemble the world's fastest supercomputer."

Supercomputers will likely get faster every year, points out Jeremy Smith, director of the Center for Molecular Biophysics at the University of Tennessee, so China's rise to the top this month isn't the end of the story. The list will likely be reordered again in June, when the next edition of the Top500 is released.

"What you find historically with these supercomputers is they become the normal machines five or 10 years later that everybody uses," said Smith, who oversees some projects run on Jaguar. "The Jaguar machine that we're so amazed at right now, it could be every university or company has one" eventually.

And of course these high-performance computer systems aren't just made to race each other, most scientists in the field would argue. They're made to solve complex problems, with eventual real-world consequences like climate change and alternative fuel production.

Smith argues that research like what's being done on Jaguar to solve the problem of superconductivity at high temperatures couldn't necessarily be done on Tianhe-1A effectively because it requires very efficient computing and coming up with the software on a computer to do that well is difficult.

But what China has accomplished is still important for supercomputing, argues Gropp, who called the number of flop/s Tianhe-1A achieved "remarkable."

"I don't want to downplay what they've done," he said. "It's like pooh-poohing the original Toyota. The first Toyota was a pile of junk. But a few years later they were eating our lunch."

It's not the first time that a non-U.S. machine has topped the rankings--the Japanese NEC Earth Simulator did it in 2004. The U.S. of course bounced back, and as of today has 275, or more than half of the systems, on the Top 500 list. China is next with 42 systems, and Japan and Germany are tied with 26 each. Still, there is concern that China's focused concentration of resources on supercomputing is fomenting a threat to the U.S.' long-term dominance there. But just trying to score the highest on the Linpack benchmark--something that any group of researchers with enough money could do fairly easily--is short-sighted.

"What we should be focusing on is not losing our leadership and being able to apply computing to a broad range of science and engineering problems," said Gropp, who is also deputy director of research at UI's Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies.

The Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is currently working on a report that addresses this exact topic, and didn't have a comment when contacted. Recently PCAST did release a draft of a document that calls for more funding for scientific computing very soon after news of Tianhe-1A's speed began to spread. And President Barack Obama weighed in briefly on the topic in a speech two weeks ago, calling for increased science funding specifically for high-performance computing.

But it's not as if the supercomputing community in the U.S has been sitting still while China sneaked up behind them. There are other projects in the works at U.S. labs that are planning on blowing Jaguar and Tianhe-1A out of the water in terms of speed.

Currently the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne and the National Science Foundation is building Blue Waters, a supercomputer that researchers say will be the fastest in the world when it is turned on sometime next year.

The Department of Energy, which owns Oak Ridge's Jaguar supercomputer, is already looking at moving from the current peta-scale computing (a quadrillion floating point operations per second) to exa-scale computing (a quintillion floating point operations per second), a speed a thousand times faster than Jaguar is currently capable of processing at. It's a goal that's still a ways out there, but the work is under way.

"To get there in the next five to 10 years, to get to 10 million cores in one room, is a major technical challenge," noted University of Tennessee's Jeremy Smith. "It's going to be fundamentally different than before. It's a hardware problem, and getting the software working is a major challenge indeed."

For more statistics on the systems in the Top500 list, please see Top500.org.

Erica Ogg

Full Profile E-mail Erica Ogg 

Erica Ogg is a CNET News reporter who covers Apple, HP, Dell, and other PC makers, as well as the consumer electronics industry. She's also one of the hosts of CNET News' Daily Podcast. In her non-work life, she's a history geek, a loyal Dodgers fan, and a mac-and-cheese connoisseur. E-mail Erica.

Top 500 supers: China rides GPUs to world domination

The People's Republic of Petaflops

By Timothy Prickett Morgan

SC10 If the June edition of the bi-annual ranking of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world represented the dawning of the GPU co-processor as a key component in high performance computing, then the November list is breakfast time. The super centers of the world are smacking their lips for some flop-jacks with OpenCL syrup and some x64 bacon on the side.

China has the most voracious appetite for GPU co-processors, and as expected two weeks ago when the Tianhe-1A super was booted up for the first time, this hybrid CPU-GPU machine installed at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin has taken the top spot on the Top 500 list with a comfortable margin. Tianhe-1A's final rating on the Linpack Fortran matrix math benchmark test is 4.7 petaflops of peak theoretical performance spread across its CPUs and GPUs (with about about 70 per cent of that coming from the GPUs) and 2.56 petaflops of sustained performance on the Linpack test.

The Tianhe-1A machine is comprised of 7,168 servers, each equipped with two sockets using Intel's X5670 processors running at 2.93 GHz and one Nvidia Tesla M2050 fanless GPU co-processor. The resulting machine spans 112 racks, and it would make a hell of a box on which to play Crysis.

While 47 per cent of the floating-point oomph in Tianhe-1A disappears into the void where all missed clock cycles go (it's also where missing socks from the dryer cavort), the GPU's flops are relatively inexpensive and the overall machine should offer excellent bang for the buck - provided workloads can scale across the ceepie-geepie of course. The Tianhe-1A super uses a proprietary interconnect called Arch, which was developed by the Chinese government. The Arch switch links the server nodes together using optical-electric cables in a hybrid fat tree configuration and has a bi-directional bandwidth of 160 Gb/sec, a latency for a node hop of 1.57 microseconds, and an aggregate bandwidth of more than 61 Tb/sec.

The Tianhe-1A GPU-GPU hybrid super

This is not the first ceepie-geepie machine that the National Supercomputer Center has put together. A year ago, the Tianhe-1 machine broke onto the Top 500 list using Intel Xeon chips and Advanced Micro Devices Radeon HD 4870 GPUs (no Tesla GPUs, but actual graphics cards). This initial "Milky Way" box (that's what "Tianhe" translates to in English) had 71,680 cores and had a peak theoretical performance of 1.2 petaflops and a sustained performance of 563.1 teraflops. The efficiency of this cluster was 53 per cent, sustained over peak performance.

Jaguar dethroned

The "Jaguar" XT5 system at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory was knocked out of the top spot by Tianhe-1A, which is what happens when a cat stands still in the GPU era of HPC. The Jaguar machine has 224,162 Opteron cores spinning at 2.6 GHz and delivers 1.76 petaflops of performance on the Linpack test. This Cray machine links Opteron blade servers using its SeaStar2+ interconnect, which has been superseded by the new "Gemini" XE interconnect in the XE6 supers that started rolling out this summer.

If Oak Ridge moved to twelve-core Opteron 6100 processors and the XE6 interconnect, it could have doubled the performance of Jaguar and held into the Top 500 heavyweight title. One other thing to note: The Jaguar machine is 75.5 per cent efficient on the Linpack benchmark, a lot better than the Tianhe-1A ceepie-geepie.

The "Nebulae" ceepie-geepie built from six-core Intel Xeon 5650 processors and Nvidia M2050 GPUs that made its debut on the June 2010 Top 500 list got knocked down from number 2 to number 3 on the list. The Nebulae machine, which is a blade server design from Chinese server maker Dawning, is installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen. It is rated at 1.27 sustained petaflops at 43 per cent efficiency against peak theoretical performance.

Number four on the list is also a ceepie-geepie, it is the upgraded Tsubame 2 machine at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. (That's shortened to TiTech rather than TIT, which would be where you'd expect a machine called Milky Way to be located. But we digress). The Tsubame 2 machine is built from Hewlett-Packard's SL390s G7 cookie sheet servers, which made their debut in early October. TiTech announced the Tsubame 2 deal back in May, and this machine includes over 1,400 of these HP servers, each with three M2050 GPUs from Nvidia.

The Tsubame 2 machine has 73,278 cores and is rated at 2.29 peak petaflops and delivered 1.19 petaflops of sustained performance on the Linpack test. That's a 52 percent efficiency, about what the other ceepie-geepies are getting. By the way, the prior Tsubame 1 machine was based on x64 servers from Sun Microsystems, with floating point accelerators from Clearspeed in only some of the nodes. And one more thing: Tsubame 2 runs both Linux and Windows, and according to the Top 500 rankers, both operating systems offer nearly equivalent performance.

In the Hopper

The fifth most-powerful super in the world based on the Linpack tests (at least the ones we know about) is a brand new box called Hopper. Installed at the US DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing center, Hopper is a Cray XE6 super using that new Gemini interconnect and twelve-core Opteron 6100 processors - no fancy schmancy GPU co-processors. (Well, at least not yet, anyway.) Hopper has 153,408 cores spinning at 2.1 GHz and delivers 1.05 petaflops of sustained performance with an efficiency of 82 per cent.

If it is not yet obvious, there is a bottleneck in getting parallel supercomputer nodes to talk through their networking stacks running on their x64 processors and out over the PCI-Express 2.0 bus. If Nvidia or AMD want to do something useful, embedding a baby x64 processor inside of a GPU co-processor along with a switchable 10 Gigabit Ethernet or 40 Gb/sec InfiniBand port would make a very interesting baby server node. Throw in cache coherence between the x64 and GPU processors and maybe getting to 50 petaflops won't seem like such a big deal.

The Bull Tera-100 super at the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique in France, is based on Intel's Xeon 7500 high-end processors and Bull's bullx supercomputer blades and ranks sixth in the world. The machine uses QDR InfiniBand to lash the nodes together, and is rated at 1.05 petaflops. This machine does not have GPUs in it from either AMD or Nvidia, and neither does number eight, the Kraken XT5 super from Cray that is owned by the University of Tennessee and which is operated by DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kraken delivers 831.7 teraflops of sustained Linpack performance, unchanged from when it came onto the list a year ago.

Number seven on the list, the Roadrunner Opteron blade system at Los Alamos National Laboratory (another DOE site) does use accelerators, but they are IBM's now defunct Cell co-processors, which are based on IBM's Power cores and which have eight vector math units per chip. While the Roadrunner machine demonstrated the viability of co-processors to push up to the petaflops. But Roadrunner is stalled at 1.04 petaflops, is probably not going to be upgraded, and is therefore uninteresting even if it will do lots of good work for the DOE. (If you consider designing nuclear weapons good work, of course.)

Number nine on the list is the BlueGene/P super, named Jugene, built by IBM for the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany, which debuted at number three at 825.5 teraflops on the June 2009 list and hasn't changed since then. Rounding out the top ten on the Top 500 list is the Cielo Cray XE6 at Los Alamos, a new box that is rated at 816.6 teraflops of sustained Linpack performance.

GPU is my co-pilot

On the November 2010 list, there are 28 HPC systems that use GPU accelerators, and the researchers who put together the Top 500 for the 36th time - Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon, computer scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, and Hans Meuer of the University of Manheim - consider IBM's Cell chip a GPU co-processor. On this list, there are sixteen machines that use Cell chips to goose their floating point oomph, with ten using Nvidia GPUs and two using AMD Radeon graphics cards.

The Linpack Fortran matrix benchmark was created by Dongarra and colleagues Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Pete Stewart back in the 1970s to gauge the relative number-crunching performance of computers and is the touchstone for ranking supercomputers.

There are three questions that will be on the minds of people at the SC10 supercomputing conference in New Orleans this week. The first is: Can the efficiency of ceepie-geepie supers be improved? The second will be: Does it matter if it can't? And the third will be: At what point in our future will GPUs be standard components in parallel supers, just like parallel architectures now dominate supercomputing and have largely displaced vector and federated RISC machines?

To get onto the Top 500 list this time around, a machine had to come in at 31.1 teraflops, up from 24.7 teraflops only six months ago. This used to sound like a lot of math power. But these days, it really doesn't. A cluster with 120 of the current Nvidia Tesla GPUs with only half of the flops coming through where the CUDA meets the Fortran compiler will get you on the list. The growth is linear, then on the June list next year, you will need something like 40 teraflops or about 150 of the current generation of GPUs. And with GPU performance on the upswing, maybe the number of GPUs in a ceepie-geepie to get onto the Top 500 list might not require so many GPUs.

Core counting

As has been the case for many years, processors from Intel absolutely dominate the current Top 500 list, with 398 machines (79.6 per cent of the boxes on the list). Of these, 56 machines are using the Xeon 5600 processors, one is still based on 32-bit Xeons, one is based on Core desktop chips, five are based on Itanium processors, and three are based on the new high-end Xeon 7500s.
In the November 2010 rankings, there are 57 machines using AMD's Opteron processors, while there are 40 machines using one or another variant of IBM's Power processors. While the machine counts are low for these two families of chips, the core counts sure are not because of the monster systems that are based on Power and Opteron chips.

There are 1.41 million Power cores on the Top 500 list this time around, which was 21.5 per cent of the total 6.53 million cores inside of the 500 boxes and which represented 7.35 aggregate petaflops or 11.2 per cent of the total 65.8 petaflops on the list. There are 1.54 million Opteron cores (23.5 per cent of cores) on the aggregate list for 14.2 peak petaflops (21.6 per cent of total flops)

None of these core counts include the GPU core counts, which is something that the Top 500 people should reconsider, even though in all cases the flops are counted.

Across all processor architectures, there are 365 machines using quad-core processors and 19 already are using CPUs with six or more processors per socket. It is safe to say that the HPC market will eat whatever number of cores the chip makers can bake.

There are two Sparc-based supers on the current Top 500 list and the Earth Simulator super built by NEC for the Japanese government is still barely on the list (and will probably be knocked off on the next list in June 2011).

Xeon rides the wave

Having said all of that, the 391 machines using Intel's Xeon processors represent the belly of the Top 500 list. With a total of 3.5 million cores (53.5 per cent of the total core count on the list) and 43.2 petaflops of number-crunching oomph (65.8 per cent of total flops), the Xeon is the champion of the top-end HPC world. Of course, the Xeon CPUs is getting credit for flops that are being done by GPUs in many cases.

In terms of core count, there are 289 machines that have between 4,096 and 8,192 cores, and 96 machines that have from 8,192 to 16,384 cores. You need more than 1,000 cores to make the list, and there are only two boxes that have fewer than 2,048 cores and only 61 have between 2,048 and 4,096 cores. The system count drops off pretty fast above this core count, with 52 machines having more than 16,384 cores.

The Top 500 list is pretty evenly split between Ethernet, with 226 machine, and InfiniBand of various speeds, at 226 machines. The remaining machines are a smattering of Myrinet, Quadrics, Silicon Graphics NUMAlink, and Cray SeaStar and Gemini interconnects. There were seven machines on the list using 10 Gigabit Ethernet for lashing nodes in parallel supers together, and 29 used 40 Gb/sec (QDR) InfiniBand

By operating system, Linux in its various incarnations dominates the list, with 450 out of 500 machines running it. Unix accounted for 20 machines, Windows five machines, and the remainder were running mixed operating systems. If Microsoft wanted to catch a new wave, it would work to get the best possible GPU runtime and programming tools to market. Just tweaking the MPI stack in Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 to get rough parity with Linux is not going to make a dent at the big supercomputer centers of the world. Then again, Microsoft is trying to move into the HPC arena from the technical workstation up, and it has other advantages that Linux platforms do not in this regard.

IBM has the most systems on the November 2010 Top 500 list, with 199 boxes (39.8 per cent of the total) and 17.1 petaflops (26 per cent of the total flops on the list) of aggregate peak performance on the Linpack test. Big Blue is followed up by Hewlett-Packard, with 158 machines and 11.7 petaflops, which works out to 31.6 per cent of machines and 17.8 per cent of total flops. Cray has only 29 machines on the current super ranking, which is 5.8 per cent of machines but 16.3 per cent of peak floating point power. Silicon Graphics has 22 machines on the list, which is 4.4 per cent of boxes and 4.5 per cent of aggregate flops. Dell has 20 boxes on the list and its hand in a few mixed boxes as well, and Oracle, Fujitsu, NEC, and Hitachi all have a handful of machines, too.

Supercomputing is inherently political (especially so given where the funding for the upper echelon of the Top 500 list comes from), and countries most certainly measure each other up in their HPC centers. The United States leads with machine count, at 275 machines with a combined 31.5 petaflops, and China has jumped well ahead of Japan to become the solid number two, with 42 machines and 12.8 petaflops in total across those machines. Japan has 26 machines that add up to 4.6 petaflops, and Germany's 26 machines have an aggregate of 3.5 petaflops. The United Kingdom is close behind with 24 machines, for a total of 2.2 petaflops, followed by Russia with 11 machines and 1.1 petaflops. ®

Newscribe : get free news in real time

Myanmar political figure Aung San Suu Kyi freed from house arrest

Myanmar nationals hold portraits of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi during a protest outside the Myanmar embassy in Phnom Penh in the May 27, 2009 file photo. (Xinhua/Reuters File Photo)

Aung San Suu Kyi, a noted political figure and leader of the "dissolved" National League for Democracy (NLD), was freed by the government on Saturday evening after serving 18 months' confinement to her residence in Yangon.

Aung San Suu Kyi's terms of house arrest expired on Saturday.

Barricades placed in front of her lake-side residence have been removed where hundreds of people along with newsmen had been gathering day and night since Friday.

NLD headquarters in Yangon are also packed with people to greet freed Aung San Suu Kyi.

The release of Aung San Suu Kyi, 65, came six days after Myanmar held a multi-party general election on Nov. 7, which her party boycotted out of election law issue.

Aung San Suu Kyi, NLD General Secretary, was last sentenced by a district court to three years' rigorous term on Aug. 11, 2009 for allegedly violating her terms of house arrest by accommodating a U.S. citizen, John William Yettaw, who swam across the Inya Lake in Yangon and sneaked into her lakeside house for three days from May 3 to 5 when she was under restriction.

The sentence was then commuted half and the remainder was suspended by the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) by putting her under 18 months of house restriction until expiry on Saturday.

She failed in appealing against her house arrest for several times earlier over the detention period.

Aung San Suu Kyi had been detained off and on for 15 out of the past 21 years from July 1989 to May 26, 2009 with the first being for nearly six years until July 10, 1995 on charge of "endangering security of the state". The second time was from Sept. 22, 2000 to May 2002 for her defiance of the government's travel restriction by forcing her way to the second largest city of Mandalay. The third time, which was from May 30, 2003, was due to the Dabayin bloody incident in northwestern Sagaing region in which clashes occurred between government supporters and NLD supporters. The fourth from May 2009 to date was due to "Yettaw Incident".

Under an offer of Myanmar top leader Senior-General Than Shwe, SPDC Chairman, for a conditional and direct talk to her personally in 2007, Aung San Suu Kyi met with Myanmar Liaison Minister U Aung Kyi for five times with the last in January 2008 since talks were initiated in October 2007.

Than Shwe's conditions set Aung San Suu Kyi to abandon her alleged" exerted efforts for confrontation, utter devastation, and imposing all kinds of sanctions including economic sanctions against Myanmar" which Aung San Suu Kyi denied.

Source: Xinhua
Newscribe : get free news in real time

US plays cards poorly with China: Nobel laureate

By Li Xing (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-11-14 07:41

This October 9, 2006 file photo shows Edmund Phelps at Columbia University. [columbia.edu]

 TANGIER, Morocco -- "The United States did not play its cards very well with China," American economist and Nobel Prize laureate Edmund Phelps said on Saturday in New York, during a live video conference with participants of the 2010 MEDays in Morocco's northern coastal city of Tangier. 

Phelps made the remark while responding to a question whether the US was somewhat isolated during the G20 summit in Seoul.

China has been showing serious efforts in reducing its dependence on exports, said the economist. "China is moving in the right direction."

China needs time to adjust its economy and cut down its reliance on exports, Phelps said. But both the US and Europe try to beat up China, placing China in a tight space, he said.

The real problem is the conflicts between Europe and the US as they fight to export more. And Obama came up with "unpopular solutions", Phelps said.

Phelps is the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in economics.

Newscribe : get free news in real time

Global Biz G20 refuses to back US push on China's currency: positive results

 G20 refuses to back US push on China's currency

(Agencies/Xinhua)
Updated: 2010-11-12 18:54

SEOUL, South Korea - Leaders of 20 major economies on Friday refused to endorse a US push to get China to let its currency rise, keeping alive a dispute that has raised the specter of a global trade war.

At the end of their two-day summit, the leaders of the Group of 20 rich and developing economies -- including US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao -- issued a statement that only said they agreed to refrain from "competitive devaluation" of currencies.

Chinese President Hu Jintao (R) meets US President Barack Obama as part of the G20 Summit in Seoul, Nov 11, 2010. [Photo/Xinhua]

Such a statement is of little consequence since countries usually only devalue their currencies in extreme situations like a severe financial crisis. Using a slightly different wording favored by the US -- "competitive undervaluation" -- would have shown the G20 taking a stronger stance on China's currency policy.

Special coverage: G20 Summit in Seoul Related readings: President Hu leaves for Japan after G20 summit G20 Summit promotes innovative finance models for SMEs  US panelists pessimistic about G20 fruit G20 leaders convene in Seoul as summit kicks off

The crux of the dispute is Washington's allegations that Beijing is artificially keeping its currency, the yuan, weak to gain a trade advantage. But the US position has been undermined by its own recent policy of printing money to boost a sluggish economy, which is weakening the dollar. 

Many countries are irate over the Federal Reserve's plans to pump $600 billion into the sluggish American economy. They see that move as a reckless and selfish scheme to flood markets with dollars, driving down the value of the US currency and giving American exporters an advantage.

Some critics warn that US interest rates kept too low for too long could inflate new bubbles in the prices of commodities, stocks and other assets. Developing countries like Thailand and Indonesia fear that falling yields on US government bonds will send money flooding their way in search of higher returns. Such emerging markets could be left vulnerable to a crash if investors later decide to pull out and move their money elsewhere.

Still, the leaders vowed to fight protectionism.

"Recognizing the importance of free trade and investment for global recovery, we are committed to keeping markets open and liberalizing trade and investment," the joint statement said.

The G20 leaders also said they will pursue policies to reduce the gaps between nations running large trade surpluses and those running deficits.

The G20 Seoul Summit has confirmed the 6-percent shift of quota shares to emerging economies in the International Monetary Fund, according to the joint communique.

"Today, we welcomed the ambitious achievements by the Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors at the Gyeongju Meeting and subsequent decision by the IMF, on a comprehensive package of IMF quota and governance reforms," said the communique.

The reform are an important step toward a more legitimate, credible and effective IMF, by ensuring that quotas and Executive Board composition are more reflective of new global economic realities, it said.

The IMF reform, it said, would continue the dynamic process aimed at enhancing the voice and representing of emerging market and developing countries, including the poorest, through a review of the quota formula by January 2013.

And the next general review of quotas would be completed by January 2014, it said.

China sees positive results at G20 Seoul summit

SEOUL - The Group of 20 (G20) summit that ended Friday has achieved positive results with concerted efforts from all participating nations, Chinese delegation spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said.

Special Coverage: G20 Summit in Seoul Related readings: G20 refuses to back US push on China's currency  G20 summit agrees on trade, currencies  Hu presents 4-point proposal at G20 summit  G20 leaders convene in Seoul as summit kicks off

Ma said that the world economy is gradually recovering, but uncertainties still remain, and that the Seoul summit witnessed the framework of G20 shifting its focus from emergency response to long-term economic governance. 

Firstly, all member countries vowed to strengthen the role of the G20, and properly deal with the new risks and new challenges in the international financial sector so as to jointly boost the positive, sustainable and balanced growth of the global economy, Ma said.

Secondly, G20 leaders agreed to further promote reform of international financial institutions, and confirmed the 6-percent shift of quota shares to emerging economies in the International Monetary Fund, he said.

Thirdly, G20 leaders for the first time listed the issue of development as a major topic, and the summit endorsed the Multi-year Action Plan on Development over the medium term, Ma said.

And fourthly, based on the achievements made in previous summits, G20 leaders pledged continuous efforts to intensify financial regulation and combat trade-protectionism, and put forward a series of new measures and steps which will be conducive to the long-term healthy and steady development of the world economy, he said.

Newscribe : get free news in real time 

Jaguar's supercomputing reign coming to an end?

A timeline of supercomputing speed.

(Credit: AMD)

 

The Jaguar supercomputer, housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory at the University of Tennessee, has been the fastest supercomputer on the planet for almost a year. But is it about to lose that title and place atop the podium?

Every six months, the Top500 project releases the rankings of the most powerful supercomputers. The current pace of technology development means the list does tend to reorder every half a year or so. But Jaguar has been poised at the top of the food chain for almost a year. Though the Top500 list doesn't get released until next week, it's been widely assumed that Jaguar will be taken down by a supercomputer built by China's National University of Defense Technology, located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.

Jaguar narrowly avoided being overtaken in June, the last time the rankings were released. The Nebulae supercomputer, located at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, came in second, achieving 1.271 petaflops/s (1.271 quadrillion floating point operations per second) running something called the Linpack benchmark.

But it appears that Jaguar's lead has been overcome this time. There have been reports about it over the last few weeks, and President Barack Obama even mentioned it during a speech last week:

"And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth--that used to be us. They're making investments because they know those investments will pay off over the long term," he said.

The supercomputers are ranked on many factors, but the the Top500 list is ordered based on the results of the Linpack benchmark. Even if it places the Tianjin supercomputer above Jaguar, it doesn't necessarily mean the U.S. is getting bumped from its perch atop supercomputing, argue two scientists who work at Oak Ridge.

"What you find historically with these supercomputers is they become the normal machines 5 or 10 years later that everybody uses."

--Jeremy Smith, Center for Molecular Biophysics

"China might have the largest number of cores in one computer, so theoretically they have the most powerful computer. But they maybe don't have the most powerful scientific codes yet that use that computer," said Jeremy Smith, director of the Center for Molecular Biophysics at the University of Tennessee, in an interview. "So from that perspective, they may not be at the same level as Oak Ridge."

Jaguar is comprised of more than 250,000 AMD Opteron cores, running extremely sophisticated computer programs that try to answer complex questions like why ribosomes (components of cells that create amino acids) are dependent on magnesium, how to simulate making more environmentally-friendly ethanol out of plant material, and how to predict climate change. Jaguar's specialty is getting all those cores running together extremely efficiently, which is a separate and perhaps harder task than just building a really powerful computer.

Smith says that the projects at Oak Ridge National Laboratory run extremely efficiently on Jaguar, and the scientific value of the computing is therefore very high.

While China's supercomputer is based on GPUs (graphics processing unit) (in this case, built by Nvidia), and it's faster technically because the CPU (central processing unit) uses the GPU to accelerate its speed. But if you don't get the software to run on it properly, it's actually harder to use, Roland Schultz, graduate student at the University of Tennessee's Center for Molecular Biophysics, said.

What Schultz says he is much more interested in is the Gordon Bell Prize, which is awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery to the most innovative scientific application of supercomputing. Teams from Oak Ridge have won most recently in 2008 and 2009 for research into high-temperature superconductivity, or sending electricity over long distances in high temperatures with no loss of transmission.

But do we make too much of who's faster? Smith put it in perspective.

"What you find historically with these supercomputers is they become the normal machines 5 or 10 years later that everybody uses," said Smith. "The Jaguar machines that we're so amazed at right now, it could be every university or company has one" eventually.

We'll know exactly how things have shaken out next week when the Top500 List is released. But even if Jaguar does get hunted down by a Chinese supercomputer, it's not as if the folks at Oak Ridge are sitting still. The Department of Energy, which owns Oak Ridge's supercomputer, is already looking at moving from the current peta-scale computing (a quadrillion floating point operations per second) to exa-scale computing (a quintillion floating point operations per second), a speed one thousand times faster than Jaguar is currently capable of processing at.

"To get there in the next 5 to 10 years, to get to 10 million cores in one room, is a major technical challenge," noted Smith. "It's going to be fundamentally different than before. It's a hardware problem, and getting the software working is a major challenge indeed."

Erica Ogg

Full Profile E-mail Erica Ogg

Erica Ogg is a CNET News reporter who covers Apple, HP, Dell, and other PC makers, as well as the consumer electronics industry. She's also one of the hosts of CNET News' Daily Podcast. In her non-work life, she's a history geek, a loyal Dodgers fan, and a mac-and-cheese connoisseur. E-mail Erica.

Recent posts from Circuit Breaker

Jaguar's supercomputing reign coming to an end?

iOS 4.2, where iPhone meets iPad

IT admins mourn Xserve's death

Will the IT guy learn to love Apple?

Oakley focuses on 3D future

Report: Hurd told contractor about EDS buy

Apple retires Xserve in favor of Mac Pro Server

Apple adds calendars back to iPhoto

Related

Is China a supercomputer threat? (Q&A)

NCSA director: GPU is future of supercomputing

Nvidia helps China to supercomputer crown

NASA images capture icy nucleus of distant comet

Researchers attack transistors to slay vampire power

SGI's old-school supercomputer now revved up

Top-10 tech tricks we're sick of seeing in movies

Lightbulb wars: More than just LED

Add a Comment (Log in or register) (4 Comments)

by Otto Holland November 11, 2010 5:50 PM PST

The article mentioned 250,000 cores of AMD Opteron. I am curious to know if those processors are the 4 cores or the new Barcelona 12 cores on 32 NANO. If they are the older 4 or 6 cores, they can be swaped out for the new 12 cores, because they use the same ZIFF socket. Just wondering....

Like this Reply to this comment

by rip_saw November 11, 2010 6:19 PM PST

Durr, who has the most cores and flops is meaningless now. Last I checked, Folding@home trumps the crap out of anything in China, and google's servers totally destroy any supercomputer, although they are not being used for that purpose. I understand the use of a single computer, but for many projects, it's just not needed.

Like this Reply to this comment

by dralw65 November 11, 2010 6:42 PM PST

This a good article that is very informative, however, the statement about ribsomes appears incorrect: ribosomes synthesize proteins from amino acids. Amino acids are not made by ribosomes.

Like this Reply to this comment

by realityenigma November 11, 2010 7:46 PM PST

When I first read this (on slashdot.org) I was concerned myself. However, I was directed to an interesting link about a supercomputer (US built) that will be ready in 2012: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/ibms-sequoia-supercomputer-to-shatter-speed-records/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Sequoia I am sure you guys can find more articles if you are interested;nevertheless, I think we can rest easy if we are worried about speed records.

Like this Reply to this comment

Newscribe : get free news in real time

'Superb' Apple 1 on the block for £100k-£150K

1976 Jobs garage tech can be yours

By Drew Cullen • Get more from this author

12th November 2010 01:16 GMT

Forgotten Tech An original Apple 1 made by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Jobs parent's garage goes on the auction block in London this month.

The Apple 1 was designed by Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976. Just 200 were made, according to the website Old Computers, and up to 50 are thought to survive.

At the time they cost £666.66, but Lot 65 is expected to fetch £100,000- £150,000, according to Christies, which says it is in superb condition.

Lot 65 has its original packaging, with the garage's return address on the typed label. Also included are the original manuals, a letter from Steve Jobs and an invoice dated 12/7/76.

Apple 1 - It could be yours

According to Christies, the Apple 1 was the first pre-assembled PC - no soldering required. As you can see from the picture above there was no casing, monitor, power supply, or keyboard. But in principle, it worked out of the box.

We have lifted the picture of an Apple 1 with lovely wooden casing from Wikimedia, so you can see what it looked like in anger.

Apple 1 - lots of lovely wood

The website Old Computers has more about the Apple 1 spec.

Christies has assembled a strong list of works - composed by iconic names from the science and technology worlds - and another rare bit of kit for the Valuable Printed Books and Manuscripts auction on November 23.

These include:

• An Enigma Machine used to code break German messages in the second World War (estimate £30K-£50K)
• A collection of offprints by Allan Turing (estimate £300k-£500K)
• A paper by Charles Babbage 'On a method of expressing by signs the action of Machinery (£10k-£15K).
• THE IMPORTANT FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE DISCOVERY OF DNA, SIGNED BY WATSON, CRICK, WILKINS, AND STOKE (£50k-£80K)
• patent specification for ENIAC, the world's first electronic computer (£6k-££9K),
• a manual co written by Grace Hopper (£1,200 -£1,500)

Happy bidding. ®
Newscribe : get free news in real time 

Related stories

• This Old Box The forgotten, fat generation of Mac Portables (9 November 2010)
• Legendary steampunk computer 'should be built' - programmer (5 October 2010)
• Brown apologises for 'appalling' treatment of Turing (11 September 2009)
• Part One 25 years of Macintosh - the Apple Computer report card (18 November 2008)
• Codebreaking Colossus returns to Bletchley Park (1 June 2004)

Asian Games glittering opening, Guangzhou shines!

Glittering opening to Asian Games
Chinese prime minister declares the games open after a spectacular opening ceremony in Guangzhou. Last Modified: 12 Nov 2010 22:03 GMT
The Asian Games officially opened with a glitzy ceremony featuring more than 6,000 performers  [AFP] China promised another spectacular opening event and delivered it to mark the start of the Asian Games. Two years after the Beijing Olympics in the Chinese capital, the southern city of Guangzhou - which for a long time served as China's window to the world - opened the world's second-biggest multi-sports event on Friday, with an aqua-themed ceremony. Athletes were ferried on 45 boats to an island venue shaped like the bow of a ship for an extravaganza of light, water and flames. More than 10,000 athletes from 45 countries or territories are competing in 42 sports starting on Saturday and finishing on November 27. Brightly illuminated in bulbs of different colours, the boats were decorated with Asian landmarks - including Japan's Mount Fuji, Cambodia's Angkor Wat, Jordan's Petra and India's Taj Mahal. China was represented by the Temple of Heaven, the Bird's Nest and the country's pavilion from the recently concluded Shanghai World Expo. Logistical issues The massive scale of the opening ceremony posed logistical issues for the Chinese organizers. Except for members of the public who won a lottery for tickets to the show, most residents in the city of 10 million had little choice but to watch on TV. The downtown area was locked down near the stadium and residents within a one-kilometer radius were ordered to leave their homes for the night - apparently to eliminate the threat of sniper fire. Many downtown subway stations were closed Friday for security sweeps and streets in the vicinity of the opening ceremony were unusually quiet for a bustling city of more than 10 million. Wen Jiaobao, the Chinese Premier, attended, and was joined by Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's president; Abhisit Vejjajiva, the Thai Prime Minister; and other dignitaries from the region. There will be 28 gold medals awarded on Saturday, the first day of full competition, with finals in shooting, swimming, triathlon, judo, weightlifting, gymnastics and in dance sports, which is making its debut at the Asian Games. India has a good chance in the shooting, with Olympic champion Abhinav Bindra and Gagan Narang in action. Japan has the leading contenders in the women's triathlon and judo, but China is again expected to lead the way from the start in the overall medal count. Newscribe : get free news in real time

Two years after dazzling the world at the Beijing Olympic Games, China gets another chance to show off its economic and sporting might when the 16th Asian Games to open in the Southern city of Guangzhou on 12.11.2010

(Chinadaily.com.cn) Updated: 2010-11-08 10:51.   

Light shoots out from the Liede Bridge into the night sky, illuminating Guangzhou, the host city of 16th Asian Games on Nov 7, 2010. Dazzling light displays for the upcoming Asian Games have been installed in some public places and high-rise buildings in Guangzhou to make the city more charming for the games. [Photo/Xinhua]

The 610-meter-high new Guangzhou TV Tower is illuminated and decorated for the upcoming Asian Games in Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong province on Nov 7, 2010.   [Photo/Xinhua] Commercial buildings and green belt along the Pearl River shine at night in Guangzhou, host city of the 16th Asian Games, Nov 7, 2010. [Photo/Xinhua] Buildings along the Pearl River have been decorated with various lights displaying images to light up Guangzhou, the host city of the 16th Asian Games, Nov 7, 2010. [Photo/Xinhua]

China's lunar probe: Bay of Rainbows reveals varied details of moon's surface

Expert: Image of Bay of Rainbows reveals varied details of moon's surface

Watch Video

Play Video

A black and white photo of the moon's Bay of Rainbows was unveiled Monday morning. The high quality photograph is expected to reveal the landscape details of the area, the proposed landing site for Chang'e 3.
The image of the Bay of Rainbows, snapped 18.7 kilometers from the moon's surface, shows a rather flat area covered with basalt soil. It is also scattered with craters of various sizes. The picture shows the landscape of the Bay.

Dr. Mu Lingli, Research Fellow of National Astronomical Observatories, said, "Of all the strip images that the camera took, this one reveals the varied details of the moon's surface. It contains old craters, and new ones with rays that extend 800-kilometers."

The photo's taken October 28th with the main camera on the lunar probe. A CCD stereo camera is designed to capture images 17 times clearer than that of the Chang'e one. The design of 96 sensors and scanning technology allows for an enhanced definition and resolution.

He said, "The resolution of Chang'e one's camera was 120 meters. The Bay of Rainbows area looks very smooth. But the new camera from Chang'e two shows the site scattered with craters. It does provide a much clearer image."

With the Bay of Rainbows images, the Chang'e 2 successfully completed its mission to scout out a landing location for its successor Chang'e 3. The satellite will continue its scientific objectives including investigating the lunar landscape and exploring the geological structure of the moon.

CCTV reporter Zhang Nini said, "This is the first batch of photos relayed back from Chang'e 2 and it's only a start. In the next five months, Chang'e will continue to send back more high resolution pictures, which will give scientists a more accurate understanding of the moon's geology and topography, and pave the way for China's future lunar programs.

Related stories

• Chang'e-2 photographs Bay of Rainbows 2010-11-08
• Close look at Bay of Rainbows 2010-10-28
• Significance of Bay of Rainbows images 2010-10-27
• China's lunar probe ready to photograph Bay of Rainbows 2010-10-27

 

China Unveils First Moon Photos From New Lunar Orbiter
By SPACE.com Staff
posted: 08 November 2010
04:24 pm ET

This photo, taken by China's Chang'e 2 lunar probe in October 2010, shows a crater in the moon's Bay of Rainbows. The image is one of the first released to the public by China's space agency. Credit: China Lunar Exploration Program [Full Story]

This photo, taken by China's Chang'e 2 lunar probe in October 2010, shows a three-dimensional map of part of the moon's Bay of Rainbows. Credit: China Lunar Exploration Program [Full Story]

This 3-D map view of the moon's Bay of Rainbows was taken by China's Chang'e 2 lunar probe in October 2010. The mission is China's second robotic mission to explore the moon. Credit: China Lunar Exploration Program [Full Story]