POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Chinese supercomputer takes title of world’s fastest from US

And immediately sends shout outs to Billy Jeff-for being the first to allow sensitive computer technology transfer to China, Bill Richardson-for providing the lax security that enabled the Chinese to steal all kinds of secrets from Sandia labs in the 90's, and to G.W. Bush's commerce department for okaying the sale of IBM's personal computing division to Chinese company Lenovo; a sale, which in addition to any manufacturing technology transfer allowed the Chinese computer giant to become 4th worldwide in sales as of 2009.

All of these acts have, at least in part, led to this revolting development:

A Chinese scientific research center has built the fastest supercomputer ever made, replacing the United States as maker of the swiftest machine, and giving China bragging rights as a technology superpower.

The computer, known as Tianhe-1A, has 1.4 times the horsepower of the current top computer, which is at a national laboratory in Tennessee, as measured by the standard test used to gauge how well the systems handle mathematical calculations, said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings.

Just ducky, eh?  And before you yawn and write this off as being in the category of such rhetorical questions as, "If one has more money than can ever be spent, how much more does one need", think again.  Although in recent years we've most often heard of supercomputer calculations in connection with the climate change connivance, there are a great many complex scientific problems that are crunched by these type of machines in disciplines such as nuclear and astro physics and aerodynamics (believe it or not!).  And they can also be used to model complex systems, for analytic purposes, like financial markets or societies.  Still another use is as a powerful, overarching, operating system; like a huge proprietary network that can handle the demands of multitudes of access nodes.

Believe me when I say this is not a good thing...

Now without submerging into full scale engineering geekiness, I'll just mention that the system is constructed by linking together myriad servers with, in this case, a proprietary Chinese interface.  And while they are currently relying on Intel x86 style processors and an innovative use of Nvidia video processing chipsets, industry analysts believe it will only be a couple of more years before they are also making a home grown version of these resources as well.

Especially in light of their drastic reduction in exporting rare earth minerals, a necessary raw material in many high-tech application; but that is a subject for another discussion.

Now in truth, we are responsible for this breakthrough.  Not only by the laxity and bad decisions of the past, but by actually funding their development throught our continuing, and massive, trade deficit with the Chinese; projected by some ot be as high as 250 billion dollars for this year alone.  And when one adds to that the interest they recieve yearly on the portion of our national debt they own, it all leads to a sobering realization.

And that reality is, that in addition to the American corporations, who's zeal to escape the extortion of labor unions led them to instead move to China, and, as such, building up their industrial infrastructure for them, at no capital cost to the Chinese government-by the way, we as a nation are providing the cash to fuel their high tech development and their military expansion as well!; while Manhattan liberals delude themselves about our military assets and capabilities...

It's bad enough that we ship nearly the same amount of cash overseas for oil; much of it going to nations that hate us, but to be sending such a large dollar amount to a nation that is using that money to facilitate economic and strategic dominance over us is truly economic suicide.  We must find a solution to this problem, because, it has already become a matter of our national security.

Rocketman