Power in Numbers: China Aims for High-Tech Primacy
Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
SPEED The Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer briefly became the world's fastest in late 2010.
By DAVID BARBOZA and JOHN MARKOFF
Published: December 5, 2011
BEIJING — In an otherwise nondescript conference room, Wu Jianping stands before a giant wall of frosted glass. He toggles a switch and the glass becomes transparent, looking down on an imposing network operations center full of large computer displays. They show maps of China and the world, pinpointing China’s IPv6 links, the next generation of the Internet.
Enlarge This Image
Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
A lab worker with the Tianhe-1A, a Chinese supercomputer, at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, China.
China already has almost twice the number of Internet users as in the United States, and Dr. Wu, a computer scientist and director of the Chinese Educational and Research Network, points out that his nation is moving more quickly than any other in the world to deploy the new protocol.
IPv6 — Internet Protocol version 6 — offers advanced security and privacy options, but more important, many more I.P. addresses, whose supply on the present Internet (IPv4) is almost exhausted.
“China must move to IPv6,” Dr. Wu said. “In the U.S., some people don’t believe it’s urgent, but we believe it’s urgent.”
If the future of the Internet is already in China, is the future of computing there as well?
Many experts in the United States say it could very well be. Because of the ready availability of low-cost labor, China has already become the world’s dominant maker of computers and consumer electronics products. Now, these experts say, its booming economy and growing technological infrastructure may thrust it to the forefront of the next generation of computing.
For China, the quest to develop advanced computing centers is not simply a matter of national pride. It is an attempt to lay the groundwork for innovative Chinese companies and to reshape the technological landscape by doing something more than assembling the world’s desktop PCs.
Never mind that there may be no Chinese Steve Jobs, said Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., president of the Economic Strategy Institute.
“There are different kinds of innovation,” he said. “We tend to equate innovation with companies that start from garages based on brainstorms.
“There is another kind of innovation that results in constant improvement that we are not good at — and they are.”
The view is not universal. Still, other experts say it would be a mistake to underestimate China’s capacity for rapid progress.
“When I went to China for the first time in 1978, I saw workers stringing together computer memories with sewing needles,” said Patrick J. McGovern, the founder of the International Data Group, an early investor in Tencent Holdings, one of the most successful Chinese Internet companies. “Now innovation is accelerating, and in the future, patents on smartphones and tablets will be originated by the Chinese people.”
Going back six decades — to Eniac, considered to be the first electronic computer — the United States has set both the pace and the path of modern computing and communication. From mainframes to iPhones, from the Arpanet to WiFi, innovation has been as American as Norman Rockwell.
And for more than a generation, the hub of innovation has been Silicon Valley, a multicultural melting pot that has supported the singular amalgam of computer-hacker ethos and entrepreneurial aggressiveness that made it the envy of the world.
Probably the most serious challenge to the Valley’s dominance came in the late 1980s from Japan, which seemed on the brink of taking command of the semiconductor and computer industries until its economy foundered.
Today, China poses a very different kind of challenge. While Japan’s economy has long been driven by exports, China will soon have the world’s largest domestic market for both Internet commerce and computing.
The world took notice of Chinese technological prowess in late 2010, when a Chinese supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, briefly became the world’s fastest. Though it was made from American processors and was soon surpassed by a Japanese machine, it was still indisputable evidence that the Chinese had achieved world-class computing designs.
This machine proved even more surprising in the West. Not only was it based on a Chinese-made microprocessor, but it also achieved a significant advance in low-power operation. That might indicate the Chinese now have a significant lead in “performance per watt” — a measure of energy-efficient computing that will prove crucial to reaching the next generation of so-called exascale supercomputers, which are computers that will be a thousand times faster than the world’s fastest today, and which are scheduled to arrive by the end of this decade.
“This is what Chinese companies need to do,” said Hu Weiwu, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who is the chief designer of another Chinese family of microprocessor chips. “We can send a spaceship to space. We can design high-performance computers.”
American officials agree, saying the Chinese government’s investment in supercomputing is paying off.
“The overall point of all of this is that the Chinese understand the importance of high-performance computing,” said Donna Crawford, the associate director of computation at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “They are executing on the plan as a key enabler for their whole society.”
Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
SPEED The Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer briefly became the world's fastest in late 2010.
By DAVID BARBOZA and JOHN MARKOFF
Published: December 5, 2011
BEIJING — In an otherwise nondescript conference room, Wu Jianping stands before a giant wall of frosted glass. He toggles a switch and the glass becomes transparent, looking down on an imposing network operations center full of large computer displays. They show maps of China and the world, pinpointing China’s IPv6 links, the next generation of the Internet.Enlarge This Image
Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
A lab worker with the Tianhe-1A, a Chinese supercomputer, at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, China.
China already has almost twice the number of Internet users as in the United States, and Dr. Wu, a computer scientist and director of the Chinese Educational and Research Network, points out that his nation is moving more quickly than any other in the world to deploy the new protocol.
IPv6 — Internet Protocol version 6 — offers advanced security and privacy options, but more important, many more I.P. addresses, whose supply on the present Internet (IPv4) is almost exhausted.
“China must move to IPv6,” Dr. Wu said. “In the U.S., some people don’t believe it’s urgent, but we believe it’s urgent.”
If the future of the Internet is already in China, is the future of computing there as well?
Many experts in the United States say it could very well be. Because of the ready availability of low-cost labor, China has already become the world’s dominant maker of computers and consumer electronics products. Now, these experts say, its booming economy and growing technological infrastructure may thrust it to the forefront of the next generation of computing.
For China, the quest to develop advanced computing centers is not simply a matter of national pride. It is an attempt to lay the groundwork for innovative Chinese companies and to reshape the technological landscape by doing something more than assembling the world’s desktop PCs.
Never mind that there may be no Chinese Steve Jobs, said Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., president of the Economic Strategy Institute.
“There are different kinds of innovation,” he said. “We tend to equate innovation with companies that start from garages based on brainstorms.
“There is another kind of innovation that results in constant improvement that we are not good at — and they are.”
The view is not universal. Still, other experts say it would be a mistake to underestimate China’s capacity for rapid progress.
“When I went to China for the first time in 1978, I saw workers stringing together computer memories with sewing needles,” said Patrick J. McGovern, the founder of the International Data Group, an early investor in Tencent Holdings, one of the most successful Chinese Internet companies. “Now innovation is accelerating, and in the future, patents on smartphones and tablets will be originated by the Chinese people.”
And for more than a generation, the hub of innovation has been Silicon Valley, a multicultural melting pot that has supported the singular amalgam of computer-hacker ethos and entrepreneurial aggressiveness that made it the envy of the world.
Probably the most serious challenge to the Valley’s dominance came in the late 1980s from Japan, which seemed on the brink of taking command of the semiconductor and computer industries until its economy foundered.
Today, China poses a very different kind of challenge. While Japan’s economy has long been driven by exports, China will soon have the world’s largest domestic market for both Internet commerce and computing.
The world took notice of Chinese technological prowess in late 2010, when a Chinese supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, briefly became the world’s fastest. Though it was made from American processors and was soon surpassed by a Japanese machine, it was still indisputable evidence that the Chinese had achieved world-class computing designs.
Then, this October, another Chinese supercomputer, the Sunway Bluelight MPP, broke the petaflop barrier — a quadrillion calculations per second — putting it among the world’s 20 fastest computers.
This machine proved even more surprising in the West. Not only was it based on a Chinese-made microprocessor, but it also achieved a significant advance in low-power operation. That might indicate the Chinese now have a significant lead in “performance per watt” — a measure of energy-efficient computing that will prove crucial to reaching the next generation of so-called exascale supercomputers, which are computers that will be a thousand times faster than the world’s fastest today, and which are scheduled to arrive by the end of this decade.
“This is what Chinese companies need to do,” said Hu Weiwu, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who is the chief designer of another Chinese family of microprocessor chips. “We can send a spaceship to space. We can design high-performance computers.”
American officials agree, saying the Chinese government’s investment in supercomputing is paying off.
“The overall point of all of this is that the Chinese understand the importance of high-performance computing,” said Donna Crawford, the associate director of computation at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “They are executing on the plan as a key enabler for their whole society.”
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