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

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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 Top500supercomputers. 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'sNational Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, 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 U.S. banned Intel 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 "national strategic computing initiative" with the goal of maintaining an "economic leadership position" in high-performance computing research.

The U.S. order seemed late. China has been steadily building 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 nothing secretive about China's intentions. Researchers and analysts have been warning all alongthat 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, wants to decrease its dependency on U.S.-made chips.

China's government last week said it plans to build an exascale system by 2020. 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.

China's work is also winning global peer recognition. It's work on TaihuLight has resulted in three submissions selected as finalists for supercomputing's prestigious Gordon Bell Award, named for a pioneer in high-performance computing.

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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17 Men Reportedly Heard Chanting, Firing Off Shots In Apple Valley Detained, Released

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losangeles.cbslocal.com

APPLE VALLEY (CBSLA.com) — Federal and local law enforcement authorities Tuesday are investigating after 17 men were detained for reportedly firing off hundreds of rounds in a remote part of Apple Valley.

San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputies and an FBI agent were among the units that detained the men – reportedly all of Middle Eastern descent – who were camping out in the Deep Creek Hot Springs area Sunday morning, authorities said.

Feds & local law enforcement investigating after 17 men, reportedly Middle Eastern, fired 100s of rounds in Apple Valley. @KNX1070

— Margaret Carrero (@KNXmargaret)March 29, 2016

A 911 caller reported hearing over 100 shots fired and seeing five to seven men wearing turbans and shooting “assault rifles, handguns, and shotguns,” according to a Sheriff’s Department statement.

A county sheriff’s helicopter located the men walking near a creek with backpacks “and other items”, The Los Angeles Times reported.

Officials say the men were cooperative as they were detained and searched.

Several handguns, a rifle, and a shotgun were found at the scene, but a records check found all the weapons were registered with the exception of the rifle, which reportedly didn’t have a serial number because it was purchased in parts, an FBI spokesperson told The Times.

Police scanner traffic posted online by the Victor Valley News Group described “a large group of subjects wearing turbans and chanting” at the scene.

“They were up all night chanting ‘Allah akbar’-type stuff,” an unidentified officer is heard saying on the audio recording.

None of the hikers interviewed by Sheriff’s investigators say they witnessed any shots being fired, according to Sheriff’s officials.

A photo of the arrests was posted by the Victor Valley News Group but were not immediately confirmed by authorities.

All 17 men were eventually released because Sheriff’s investigators say they had no outstanding warrants or criminal histories.

“There was no evidence found that a crime had been committed by any of the subjects who were detained and they were released,” a Sheriff’s spokesperson said.

The FBI may conduct further interviews with the men to determine if any crimes were committed, The Times reported.

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Russian Defense Ministry accuses Pentagon of imitating fight against Islamic State

tass.ru

MOSCOW, December 28. /TASS/. The Pentagon, refusing to transfer the data on terrorist targets in Syria to the Russian military, continues to fight against the Islamic State terrorist group "in word only", Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov told reporters on Monday.

He thus commented on a recent statement by the Pentagon spokesperson Michelle Baldanza who confirmed that the US military did not intend to share with Moscow the information on IS targets until Russia changes its policy towards Syrian President Bashar Assad. "We are not going to cooperate with Russia on Syria until they change their strategy of supporting Assad and instead focus on ISIL (IS)," Baldanza said.

"The hackneyed thesis has once again confirmed that the Pentagon will fight against IS in word only, instead of taking real action," Konashenkov said. "The statement by the US Defense Department spokesperson Michelle Baldanza about the [US side’s] refusal from any cooperation in the fight against Islamic State is a broken record, and it’s high time to change it," he said.

The Russian Defense Ministry spokesman said that at last week’s news briefing of the chief of the Main Operations Directorate of the Russian General Staff, General Sergey Rudskoy, the military presented data on changes in the routes of illegal transportation of oil by the Islamic State militants.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the new routes run through the north-western regions of Iraq, which "are in the focus of constant attention of the United States." "We publicly told our American colleagues that it is necessary not to discuss the IS activities in Iraq, but to take real action to block the terrorists’ sources of income in the region," Konashenkov said.

On December 25, Sergey Rudskoy told journalists that Russian intelligence found almost 12,000 tank/delivery trucks on the Turkish-Iraqi border near Zakho, where the ‘eastern’ oil smuggling route used by the Islamic State terrorist group runs. "As of the time the imagery was shot, there were 11,775 tank and delivery trucks on both sides of the Turkish-Iraqi border in the vicinity of Zakho, with 4,530 of them in Turkey and 7,250 in Iraq," he added. "It is worth mentioning that oil extracted both in Iraq and in Syria is smuggled via the checkpoint there," he added.

The Defense Ministry had said previously that the Russia-banned Islamic State’s eastern oil smuggling route led from the oilfields in Syria’s northeast and Iraq’s northwest to Turkey via the border towns of Kara Chokh, Cham Khanik, Tavan and Zakho. Since the beginning of the operation in Syria, Russian aircraft have taken out around 2,000 tank trucks operated by the militants. "Thirty-seven oil wells and refineries operated by the terrorists and 17 tank truck convoys hauling oil products have been eliminated over the last week," Rudskoi said.

The Russian military launched an air operation against the militants with the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria on September 30 by request of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Russian air task force in Syria included over 50 aircraft, including Su-34 (NATO reporting name: Fullback) and Su-24M (Fencer) tactical bombers, Su-25 (Frogfoot) attack aircraft, Su-30SM (Flanker-H) multirole fighters and Mi-8 (Hip) and Mi-24 (Hind) helicopters. The Russian Defense Ministry issued a statement in mid-November that it would focus its strikes on the oil production, storage, refining and transportation facilities controlled by Islamic State militants.

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Coming to America? China Introduces ‘Credit Score’ For Obedient Citizens

www.infowars.com

China’s largest social networks have partnered with the country’s Communist government to create a credit score system that will measure how obedient its citizens are, a chilling prospect that could one day arrive in America if social justice warriors get their way.

Entitled ‘Sesame Credit’, the program, “Aims to create a docile, compliant citizenry who are fiscally and morally responsible by employing a game-like format to create self-imposed, group social control. In other words, China gamified peer pressure to control its citizenry; and, though the scheme hasn’t been fully implemented yet, it’s already working — insidiously well,” reports Zero Hedge.

Sesame Credit is operated by Alibaba and Tencent, two companies that run all the top social networks in China, including Weibo, which has over 200 million users. It works by measuring not only purchase and bill paying history but also “political compliance.”

“Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like, such as about the Tiananmen Square massacre that the government carried out to hold on to power, or the Shanghai stock market collapse. It will hurt your score not only if you do these things, but if any of your friends do them,” warns the ACLU.

In other words, people will face the threat of not only becoming a target of state surveillance, but also losing their friends if they express political views frowned upon by the state. This social pressure would obviously make individuals far less likely to criticize the government or to counter a dominant social narrative. The credit scores can also be seen by anyone, adding the further burden of potential public shaming for controversial opinions.

The idea is ripped straight from the script of The Prisoner – a cult 1960’s TV show in which the authorities in control of ‘The Village’ attempt to break Number 6 and strip him of his individuality. In one episode, Number 6 is declared “unmutual” and faces ostracization from the rest of the community.

Rick Falkvinge compared this new method of molding the ‘good citizen’ to how the KGB and the Stasi would neutralize dissent.

“The KGB and the Stasi’s method of preventing dissent from taking hold was to plant so-called agents provocateurs in the general population, people who tried to make people agree with dissent, but who actually were arresting them as soon as they agreed with such dissent, he writes. “As a result, nobody would dare agree that the government did anything bad, and this was very effective in preventing any large-scale resistance from taking hold. The Chinese way here is much more subtle, but probably more effective still.”

Johan Lagerkvist also warns that the program will scrutinize what books people read, labeling it akin to “Amazon’s consumer tracking with an Orwellian political twist.”

Sesame Credit is currently opt-in only but is set to become mandatory by 2020.

Could such a system ever take off in America? For years, the Obama White House has been pushing cybersecurity initiatives that would mandate de facto government permission to use the Internet. Since web access would be linked with an individual user’s identify, it could easily be restricted if that individual dares to dissent against the state.

A credit score for expressing politically correct opinions also sounds like a utopian wet dream for social justice warriors, who utilize the power of mob outrage to pester governments and corporations into publicly shaming people who challenge their narratives.

Indeed, prominent feminists are alreadycalling on the United Nations to pressure ISPs and governments to cut off web access for those who dare to disagree with feminists and leftists online.

If the we continue to treat the feelings of perpetually offended outrage mobs with more importance than free speech – particularly controversial and unpopular free speech – there’ll be no need for governments to impose a social credit score to control citizens – we’re already imposing it on ourselves by default.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.

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