News on China's scientific and technological development.

Yesterday, we took the plunge and reported on the pervasive rumor that a MIC-based Chinese system had been validated by Top 500 brass in person—proving dramatic LINPACK performance against the Titan and the rest of the leaders of the supercomputing pack.

There is currently a team from the Top500 in China and they have reported that they’ve examined the system and that indeed, its performance parallels the early reports.

This morning we’ve been able to confirm a number of details about the system, which for the sake of brevity, we’ll present here in rather short form. Before doing so, thanks to all of you who scurried around to send us emails late last night with confirmation, further details, and insight about the new top super.

The reported performance (we have four highly credible sources confirming) is between 53-55 peak and between 27-29 LINPACK sustained performance. This is actually better than we were led to believe yesterday when it felt a little wrong to make the "50 petaflop" claim, despite our best sources telling us it was so.

The odd thing is that this is the famed Tianhe-2 system—yes, the one that wasn’t even supposed to be completed until 2015. Further, the system’s grand unveiling was going to unleash 100 petaflops onto the world. While we’re still working on understanding the odd timing on this, the fact remains that there’s nothing on the horizon that is going to be able to touch it unless there are some major surprises, which sources emphatically say there will not be.

Inspur, whose pride and joy petaflopper sits eagerly at the Guangzhou Supercomputer Centre, noted today (no edits, which will become painfully obvious):

“This will be the second time that China win the first chair of of Top500 after 3 years of Tianhe-1A. This based the continuous improvement of Chinese HPC industry, that Chinese ‘hard power’ is one of the largest in the world like HPC R&D and construction, etc. Meanwhile, the Chinese ‘soft power’ include HPC application and talents catches up on the advanced level in the world.”

They conclude their hard/soft power statement with the claim that, “The worldwide HPC distribution maybe is changing.”

And for those who are saying this is a “stunt system” we should note that we’re trying to drill down on just what applications this big maw will be crunching. We are also trying to get a handle on how many MICs they’re wrangling—the reports (too early for now) are simply staggering—this will make one hell of a programming article when we’re on hand at ISC.

This is a MIC-only system from what we understand—no GPU acceleration thrown in for added fire, which was what gave the Tianhe-1A its chart-topping power.

What a stellar year for Intel…we’re also lining up some commentary from their end, although there’s little chance they’ll speak on record about the specs until the list is formally announced.

Stay tuned and thanks again for all the info.

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The Beijing Subway's Line 10 will soon have "reverse vending machines", which will pay customers for their empty plastic bottles.

After customers put their empty bottles into the machines, the devices identify and compact the bottles, and customers have their monetary reward scanned into their transportation cards.

The refrigerator-sized machines, about 40 in all, will be in most Line 10 subway stations.

"We have placed two such reverse vending machines at the terminal of Beijing Capital International Airport and four at the city's subway stations," said Feng Juan, an employee of Incom Resources Recovery Recycling, which makes the machines. "They have been well received so far."

More than 30,000 empty bottles have been collected since December, she said.

"People are encouraged and rewarded for turning trash into treasure, and the recycling companies can also get empty bottles of better quality this way," Feng said.

If something other than an empty bottle is cast into the machine, such as waste paper, the machine will spit it out.

The company is coming up with more ways to pay customers, including providing their monetary reward to Alipay, a third-party payment platform, and to IC cards for cafeterias within an office building or community.

Supported by the National Development and Reform Commission and Beijing Municipal Commission of Development and Reform, the reverse vending machines will be introduced to colleges and universities soon, Feng said.

The company is also considering covering more recycling materials, including used teaching materials and books.

Long-term plans call for about 2,000 reverse vending machines to be placed throughout the city in the next few years, including 80 at colleges and universities, shopping malls, communities and office buildings, the company said.

Despite the country's years of effort to encourage trash recycling, a lot of garbage is still randomly discarded.

Chang Tao, director of the company, said that if the pilot project works well in the city, the company will consider expanding the trash-to-treasure service to other developed cities in the eastern part of China.

Most beverage bottles are made of polyethylene terephthalate, which many governments worldwide encourage to be separated from other plastic waste to have them made into bottles again.

"Many unlicensed waste collection agencies transfer the plastic bottles into clothes or plastic basins, which is a degradation of the value of the material," said Mao Da, an expert in solid-waste management at Beijing Normal University.

The machines might well encourage the public to form a recycling habit and save resources, he said.

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The China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Development Association said on Thursday that Qianlong No1 completed a successful dive of 4,159 meters in the South China Sea in May.

The dive was a major boost to efforts to explore the ocean floor and carry out research.

Qianlong No1 is 4.6 meters long and 1.6 meters wide, weighing about 1,500 kilograms.

The submersible is designed with a maximum diving depth of 6,000 meters and a continuous traveling time of 24 hours.

The vehicle can survey the sea floor and collect deep-sea data.

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LONDON - Research papers published by China-based authors in Nature branded journals in 2012 increased by 35 percent on the 2011 figure, the Nature Publishing Index 2012 (NPI) China showed on Wednesday.

The report, published as a supplement to Nature, showed that authors from institutions in China contributed 8.5 percent, or 303 papers, of all research papers published in Nature branded journals in 2012, up from 7.0 percent in 2011 and 5.3 percent in 2010. In 2000, just six articles published in Nature branded journals had co-authors from institutions in China.

The top two institutions remain stable from 2011 to 2012: the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) leads, followed by the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). Tsinghua University, Peking University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) complete the top five.

The NPI also provides indicators that China, traditionally strong in physical sciences, is making gains in high quality life sciences research.

The Nature Publishing Index 2012 China supplement also presents a ranking by city. Beijing continues to dominate, followed by Shanghai, Hefei, Hong Kong and Wuhan.

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Truthfulness said:

China will become Lord of the World!

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The first unit of the Hongyanhe nuclear power station, the first nuclear power plant and largest energy project in Northeast China, went into commercial operation on June 6, the plant announced on Friday.

It increased the number of the nuclear power units operating on the Chinese mainland to 17, with a total installed capacity of 14.77 million kilowatts, said Hu Guangyao, spokesperson of the China General Nuclear Power Group. Hu said this unit can generate 26 million kilowatt-hours of electricity everyday, which can meet the annual electricity needs of 6,000 families.

Located at Wafangdian of Dalian, Northeast China's Liaoning province, the plant is 270 km from Shenyang to the north and 110 km from Dalian to the south. It is jointly invested by the China General Nuclear Power Group, the China Power Investment Corporation, and the Dalian Construction Investment Group.

According to Yu Changliang, vice-general manager of the plant, the Hongyanhe plant will construct six million-kilowatt-level pressurized water reactor units. The construction of the first phase of the project, which features four units with total investment of 53.5 billion yuan ($8.72 billion), began in August 2007 and is expected to be completed by the end of 2015.

By then, the four units will generate more than 30 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, accounting for 104 percent of the total electricity consumption of Dalian or one sixth of Liaoning province in 2012. Compared with the same scale of coal-fired power plants, the four units can reduce about 10 million tons of coal consumption every year, reducing the emission of 24 million tons of carbon dioxide, 230,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, and 150,000 tons of nitrogen oxides.

"The environmental effect is equivalent to one third of the forest area of the Changbai Mountain in Northeast China," said Hu Guangyao. Currently, the China General Nuclear Power Group has eight nuclear power units on commercial operation with a total installed capacity of 8.33 million kilowatts.

Fourteen units with a total installed capacity of 16.64 million kilowatts are under construction, ranking first in the world, according to Hu. Hu introduced that all the group’s nuclear power plants respond positively to the public concerns about nuclear safety by establishing nuclear and radiation safety information platform, regularly holding press conferences, and inviting people to visit the plants to make the public know more about nuclear power.

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The ability to send perfectly secure messages from one location on the planet to another has obvious and immediate appeal to governments, the military and various commercial organisations such as banks. This capability is already possible over short distances thanks to the magic of quantum cryptography, which guarantees the security of messages, at least in theory.

For the moment, however, quantum cryptography works only over distances of 100 km or so. That’s how far it is possible to send the single photons that carry quantum messages through an optical fibre or through the atmosphere.

Last year, we watched as European and Chinese physicists battled to claim the distance record for this technology with the Europeans finally triumphing by setting up a quantum channel over 143 kilometres through the atmosphere.

That distance is a good fraction of the way into space. And the reason that’s important is that it’s a stepping stone to sending quantum messages to orbiting satellites which can then route the messages to almost anywhere else on the planet.

Today, the Chinese claim another small victory in this quantum space race. Jian-Wei Pan at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai and a few pals say they’ve bounced single photons off an orbiting satellite and detected them back on Earth. That’s significant because it simulates a satellite sending single photons from orbit to the surface, crossing off another proof-of-principle milestone in their quantum checklist.

The experiment is simple in principle. These guys have two telescopes in a binocular formation which they pointed at a satellite orbiting at an altitude of 400 kilometres. This satellite is covered with reflectors capable of bouncing a laser beam from Earth back to its original location.

They used one of the telescopes to send pulses of light towards the satellite and the other, with a diameter of 60 cm, to look for the reflection.

Of course, the Earth’s atmosphere absorbs a very high percentage of the photons transmitted from the ground. So Jian-Wei and produced each pulse with just enough photons so that, on average, just one would reach the satellite and be reflected back to Earth. The idea was to simulate the satellite itself sending single photons to the surface.

Each pulse began its journey from Earth with about 1 billion photons and, on average, just one started the return journey.
Obviously, many of the returning photons would also be absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere. So the pulse was repeated many millions of times a second.

The result, say Jian-Wei and co, is that they were able to detect the returning photons at a rate of about 600 per second. “These results are sufficient to set up an unconditionally secure QKD link between satellite and earth, technically,” they add.

That’s a significant stepping stone. “Our results represent a crucial step towards the final implementation of high-speed QKD between the satellite and the ground stations, which will also serve as a test bed for secure intercontinental quantum communication,” say the Chinese team.

However, this experiment raises something of a puzzle. The Chinese team say they used a German satellite called CHAMP for their experiment. This was launched in 2000 and its mission was to make a precise gravity map of the Earth by bouncing lasers off it.

What’s curious about the Chinese announcement is that CHAMP deorbited in 2010. So a curious question is when the team did this work. Clearly, the team has been sitting on this result for some time.

Why publish it now? The answer may be a small but significant detail revealed in the final paragraph of the paper. Here Jian-Wei and co announce that they plan to launch the first quantum science experiment into space. The spacecraft is called the Chinese Quantum Science Satellite and it is scheduled for launch in 2016.

A quick Google search shows that the official Chinese news agency, Xinhau, revealed in March that its scientists were planning a quantum information and technology space experiment. But the announcement did not give the name of the satellite and appears to have had little if any coverage in the west.

“We hope to establish a quantum communication network from Beijing to Vienna,” according to Jian-Wei, a plan that will presumably require significant co-operation from their arch-competitors in Europe.

Last year, European scientists themselves proposed sending a quantum communications experiment to the International Space Station, an idea that could be beat the Chinese at their own game and would be relatively cheap and quick. But whether this plan has gained traction isn’t clear.

What is abundantly clear is that the quantum space race is rapidly hotting up. But the embarrassing truth for American science is that the US isn’t yet a player in the quantum space race (at least not publicly). Perhaps that’s something that should change.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1306.0672 : Experimental Single-Photon Transmission from Satellite to Earth

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What is abundantly clear is that the quantum space race is rapidly hotting up. But the embarrassing truth for American science is that the US isn’t yet a player in the quantum space race (at least not publicly). Perhaps that’s something that should change.

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