China Could Supplant U.S. as the Supercomputing Superpower
It wasn’t supposed to get this close. Five years ago, the U.S. was on track to build a supercomputer on par with the Tihane-2. The plan is still to someday build these “exascale systems” — machines that are 30 times as powerful as Tihane-2 — but by 2010 the recession intervened and funding never materialized, says Horst Simon, Deputy Laboratory Director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “At the same time that the Chinese have made this big step forward, the American investment is stagnating,” he says.
To build these so-called exascale systems will take a coordinated effort. Many of the components are under development. Chipmakers such as Nvidia, Intel and AMD are working on new microprocessors that will be power-efficient enough to make these systems work. But the country also needs basic research to develop the networking and software tools that will power these systems.
That isn’t happening fast enough, says Dongarra. “The country’s paralyzed in terms of spending money,” he says. “Right now, we can’t get our act together in terms of the exascale plan.”
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