The Rising Dragon

 

 

"And we thought all along the dragon was only sleeping..."

An interesting thing has happened while we were not paying attention. This very populous Communist country on the other side of the Pacific, is becoming quite a force in the world. One of the things that caught me off guard was it's new found prowess in supercomputing. In November 2013, only four short months ago, the Tianhe-2 (means "Milky Way") was introduced in China. This monster beat out the Cray Research Titan for the fastest in the world. How fast? Almost 34 petaflops, which is almost twice the speed of Titan.

Not to get too nerdy, but a "flop" from petaflop is defined as FLoating-point Operations Per Second. A "peta" is one with fifteen zeroes behind it. That is a lot of cheddar! The Titan, which is one of our crown jewels of computing, can do less than 18 petaflops - Tianhe-2 can do almost 34. As you can see, China did not just nudge us out of first place, they smoked us.

The US however, is not just standing still with this recent reduction in rank. The DOE has commissioned a study known as Fast Forward. The purpose of this study is to come up with computer architecture that will break the next computing "sound barrier". In other words, go from petaflop to exaflop. An exaflop is a quintillion calculations per second. That is a one followed by 18 zeroes. This speed would be about a million times faster than the fastest laptop computer on the market today. If the United States is successful, this technology could be in use by 2020, and put us back on top by a wide margin. Although the focus would be supercomputing, it could also affect the processing speed and storage speed of laptops also.

Now Fast Forward is not a secret we are trying to keep from the Chinese. It has been in the press and the tech blogs. I don't for a second think the Chinese are going to rest on their success with Tianhe-2. This next leap in technology is really going to be a game changer. We know it, and so does every other country in the computing business. However, the Chinese have one advantage that we don't have. They can throw thousands of people at a project, all of which are paid for by the state. We have to rely on a collaboration of public and private research funding.

So as China continues to expand its manufacturing footprint, it also continues to develop a more robust blue water Navy, it also works on a viable space program, and they also are becoming a tech giant. The dragon is rising, and we are only watching. As we continue to focus on the denominator rather than the numerator, due to issues such as "fairness" and "income redistribution", China has seen the opening and is sprinting towards the finish. The dragon now sees the once powerful and feared tiger for what it has become. A paper tiger, awash in a sea of political correctness and low expectations.