By some measures, China now has the world’s best computer. The question is whether America should worry about it.
As John Markoff writes, China dominates the newest list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, with both the fastest calculating machine and the most computers among the world’s 500 fastest machines.
The United States was a strong second, but it used to dominate the list. From the American point of view, not good.
On raw numbers, the winning machine is quite a piece of engineering. Supercomputer performance is measured in what are called “floating-point operations,” or flops, which are the math exercises involving numbers carrying a decimal point. This year’s winner from China does 93 quadrillion (a thousand million, times a million) of them a second. That’s about three times faster than last year’s winner from China.
Perhaps as impressive as the outcome is the means by which the machines’ engineers arrived at the output. The United States does not allow the shipment of advanced semiconductors to China, because chips of that kind can be used in weapons design. So the winning team figured out how to string together over 40,000 Chinese-made chips, each with the processing power of a nice smartphone.
That achievement also underlines some shortcomings in viewing this as a straightforward competition, however. The winning computer required as much power as would be needed for 15,000 American homes, and seemed to hit that power level by using relatively little memory.
It is a fine machine, but it may not be a very practical machine. The real race now may be how quickly China can develop its own artificial intelligence industry, along with high-performance semiconductors. These could, if combined with the networking know-how shown by this machine, make a severely daunting computer. It is spending billions on that effort.
Even more than for the bragging rights, supercomputers now matter for everything from weather forecasting to packaged-goods design. They are increasingly important for the great number of products and processes that are being developed using A.I.
The United States lost the race to the top in supercomputers, but it still placed pretty well. It had 165 machines on the list, compared with 167 for China. Japan, which came in third, had 29 computers on the list. The United States had the largest number of supercomputers in the top 20.
And the United States has leading researchers in A.I., both in universities and at companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook. The companies matter because they have lots and lots of data on which to train machines, a critical part of making algorithms work better.
Intel, the world’s largest maker of semiconductors, is now focusing on the use of high-performance chips in commercial A.I., particularly as part of overall computing systems of chips and data. On Monday, Intel showed the latest A.I. features of its high-end commercial chips at an international supercomputing conference in Germany.
One feature that figured in the presentation was the ability to deliver nine times the performance of other commercial A.I. systems for the same money. That is a metric the supercomputing list doesn’t consider. But, as they say, it’s money that matters.
“People miss the importance of making powerful machines accessible to everyone,” said Nidhi Campbell, who runs Intel’s work in this area. “This has implications for lots of things in the future, like autonomous cars, but first it has to work easily and well.”