The field of competitors looking to bring exascale-capable computers to the market is a somewhat crowded one, but the United States and China continue to be the ones that most eyes are on. …
As an economic powerhouse and with a rising military and political presence around the world, you would expect, given the inherent political nature of supercomputing, that China would have multiple and massive supercomputing centers as well as a desire to spread its risk and demonstrate its technical breadth by investing in many different kinds of capability class supercomputers. …
As we described in some detail in a previous piece that outlined the impetus for China to step up development of its own supercomputer chips following the trade restrictions for Intel chips in large Chinese systems, China will continue to stick to the accelerated machine approach for the upgrade of its top-ranked Tianhe-2 system. …
When the U.S. blocked exports of Intel chips for key Chinese supercomputers the expectation was that it would do little more than hasten the development of native architectures, effectively pushing up the timeline for Chinese chipmakers to find their own solutions to large-scale computing without Intel. …
If the bi-annual list of the world’s fastest, most powerful supercomputers was used as indicator of key technological, government investment, and scientific progress, one could make some striking predictions about where the next centers of worldwide innovation are likely to rest. …
When IBM sent Zaphiris Christidis on an international assignment to China to manage the supercomputing division for climate and environment applications, he would be part of an over 50,000 strong force in China managing weather forecasting and research. …
It has been somewhat difficult to ascertain what problems the fastest supercomputer on the planet has been chewing on since it was announced in 2013, but there are some signs that China is now pinning the machine’s mission on the future of genomics, among other areas. …
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