China's Defense/Military Breaking News Thread

supercat

Major
I think this is definitely defense related, from simulation of nuclear explosions to aerodynamic calculations etc etc:

China builds world’s fastest supercomputer without U.S. chips

China’s massive system runs real applications and is ‘not just a stunt machine,’ says top U.S. supercomputing researcher

China on Monday revealed its latest supercomputer, a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. This follows a U.S. government decision last year to deny China access to Intel's fastest microprocessors.

There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China's new system, the Sunway TaihuLight. Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops, according to the latest biannual release today of the world's
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supercomputers. It is the first system to exceed 100 petaflops. A petaflop equals one thousand trillion (one quadrillion) sustained floating-point operations per second.

The most important thing about Sunway TaihuLight may be its microprocessors. In the past, China has relied heavily on U.S. microprocessors in building its supercomputing capacity. The world's next fastest system, China's Tianhe-2, which has a peak performance of 54.9 petaflops, uses Intel Xeon processors.

TaihuLight, which is installed at China's
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, uses ShenWei CPUs developed by Jiangnan Computing Research Lab in Wuxi. The operating system is a Linux-based Chinese system called Sunway Raise.

The TaihuLight is "very impressive," said Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee and one of the academic leaders of the Top500 supercomputing list, in a report about the new system.

TaihuLight is running "sizeable applications," which include advanced manufacturing, earth systems modeling, life science and big data applications, said Dongarra. This "shows that the system is capable of running real applications and [is] not just a stunt machine," Dongarra said.

It has been long known that China was developing a 100-plus petaflop system, and it was believed that China would turn to U.S. chip technology to reach this performance level. But just over a year ago, in a surprising move, the
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from supplying Xeon chips to four of China's top supercomputing research centers.

The U.S. initiated this ban because China, it claimed, was using its Tianhe-2 system for nuclear explosive testing activities. The U.S. stopped live nuclear testing in 1992 and now relies on computer simulations. Critics in China suspected the U.S. was acting to slow that nation's supercomputing development efforts.

Four months after the Intel ban, in July 2015, the White House issued an executive order creating a "
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" with the goal of maintaining an "economic leadership position" in high-performance computing research.

The U.S. order seemed late.
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its supercomputing capacity, which included efforts to develop its own microprocessors. It produced a relatively small supercomputer in 2011 that relied on homegrown processors, but its big systems continued to rely on U.S. processors.

There has been
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about China's intentions. Researchers and analysts
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that U.S. exascale (an exascale is 1,000 petaflops) development, supercomputing's next big milestone, was lagging.

It's not just China that is racing ahead. Japan and Russia have their own development efforts. Europe is building supercomputers using ARM processors, and, similar to China,
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on U.S.-made chips.

China's government last week said it plans to build an
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. The U.S. has targeted 2023.

China now has more supercomputers in the Top500 list than the U.S., said Dongarra. "China has 167 systems on the June 2016 Top500 list compared to 165 systems in the U.S," he said, in an email. Ten years ago, China had 10 systems on the list.

Of all the supercomputers represented on the global list, the sum of the China supercomputers performance (211 petaflops) has exceeded the performance of the supercomputers in the U.S., (173 petaflops) represented on this list. The list doesn't represent the universe of all supercomputers in the U.S. None of the supercomputers used by intelligence agencies, for instance, are represented on this list.

"This is the first time the U.S. has lost the lead," said Dongarra, in the total number of systems on the Top500 list.

The fastest U.S. supercomputer, number 3 on the Top500 list, is the Titan, a Cray supercomputer at U.S. Dept. of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory with a theoretical peak of about 27 petaflops.

Whether the U.S. chip ban accelerated China's resolve to develop its own microprocessor technology is a question certain to get debate. But what is clear is China's longstanding goal to end reliance on U.S. technology.

"The Chinese were already determined over time to move to an indigenous processor," said Steve Conway, a high performance computing analyst at IDC. "I think the ban accelerates that -- it increases that determination," he said.

HPC has become increasingly important in the economy. Once primarily the domain of big science research, national security and high-end manufacturing such as airplane design, HPC's virtualization and big data analysis capabilities have made it critical in almost every industry. Manufacturers of all sizes, increasingly, are using supercomputers to design products virtually instead of building prototypes. Supercomputer are also used in applications such as fraud detection and big data analysis.

HPC has is now "so strategic that you really don't want to rely on foreign sources for it," said Conway.

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Iron Man

Major
Registered Member
The 052D is "better" than the Arleigh Burke just because of its AESA vs Arleigh Burke's PESA? This is somewhat amusing. A complete, overall ship to ship comparison seems to suggest against the 052D being better than the Arleigh Burke, especially as the Burke is a third larger than the 052D and also carriers far more ordinance, and not only because of its ESSM quad-packing ability, not to mention its dual helo hangar, superior SM-2 and SM-6 missile technology, and its mature Aegis combat data system.
 

SinoSoldier

Colonel
Forget the 052D-vs-AB or KJ-2000 arguments.

What is doubtful is the assertion that the Iraqi Army was once more sophisticated than the PLA in the 1990s.
 

Blitzo

Lieutenant General
Staff member
Super Moderator
Registered Member
I thought only 5 or 6 KJ-2000. But it seems the author knows what he is talking about

The author most certainly does not.



The 052D is "better" than the Arleigh Burke just because of its AESA vs Arleigh Burke's PESA? This is somewhat amusing. A complete, overall ship to ship comparison seems to suggest against the 052D being better than the Arleigh Burke, especially as the Burke is a third larger than the 052D and also carriers far more ordinance, and not only because of its ESSM quad-packing ability, not to mention its dual helo hangar, superior SM-2 and SM-6 missile technology, and its mature Aegis combat data system.

I personally find anyone who tries to say ship A is better than ship B to be the sort of people who tend to oversimplify their "analysis"... not only do they usually not consider all elements of the various subsystems together as a system, but they also don't consider the intended roles, not to mention differing cost between separate ships (or aircraft, or tanks, or whatever).

This comparison by the author is obviously far too simple to be taken seriously.

If one had to superficially compare the Burke with the 052D I think it's obvious that Burke is a larger and more heavily armed warship than the 052D, and is equipped with a fairly mature combat system and has the benefits of integration of a variety of differing missiles for its Mk-41 VLS, and has two helicopters etc.
OTOH the 052D is a smaller warship, but it uses a newer type of radar and a larger universal VLS designed with both hot and cold launch in mind, and in some ways the 052D has a more complete onboard ASW suite as well with its bow, towed and variable depth sonars... but it only has one helicopter, it has less overall VLS count, it uses a less mature combat system, and its VLS likely has yet to be integrated with the same extent and variety of weapons as the Mk-41 is compatible with, so on and so forth...

Instead of directly comparing ships, it's easier to only compare the relevant subsystems to get a gauge for their potential capabilities.

The National Interest website is particular guilty of useless superficial comparisons.
 

Hyperwarp

Captain
Forget the 052D-vs-AB or KJ-2000 arguments.

What is doubtful is the assertion that the Iraqi Army was once more sophisticated than the PLA in the 1990s.

Maybe because Iraqi Army at one point had T-72 MBT many other soviet equipment. In-contrast the Type-96/98 entered service 1997 onwards. PLA always had a massive numerical edge over almost everyone, but the remember author said more sophisticated.

When it come to the air-force at least on paper in 1990/91 the Iraqi AF had MiG-29, MiG-25, MiG-23, MiG-21, Il-76 "ADNAN 1" AEW, Tu-16, Mirage F1 to name some. Compare this the J-5, J-6, J-7, J-8I, Q-5, H-6 the PLAAF had.

This shows how far the entire PLA has come since 1991. Its an incredible unprecedented improvement.
 
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