The Internet was originally part of a federally funded research program. America needs to get the government in play fast with supercomputers. Here’s the breaking news. (Return regularly to youngresearch.com for updates.)
Back in June, The Associated Press reported that a Chinese supercomputer was deemed the world’s fastestfor the seventh year in a row. In addition, for the first time, China has now officially topped the U.S. with the most supercomputers on TOP500’s renowned list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Even Japan is on track to build an exascale computer before the U.S.
Supercomputers are now the key to establishing military might. Authoritative governments like China and Russia have an advantage over the U.S. since they can boost their spending on such computers without argument. The U.S. can’t let those countries assume an advantage – and the first step to achieve parity in this space is increasing public awareness.
Today, warfare is increasingly carried out by drones, and the introduction of self-driving vehicles will likely pave the way for self-driving tanks as well. While information has always been at the heart of warfare, these days, Chinese and Russian hackers are on the front line of information wars that are proxies for armed conflicts.
Often, innovation occurs in the private sector first and then spreads to the government. But we haven’t seen significant progress in supercomputing in the U.S. because many companies are too focused on quarterly results to sink significant funding into high-performance computing R&D.
The federal government has the power to take back our place at the top of the supercomputing rankings, before we lose any more ground to foreign powers. After all, the Internet was originally part of a federally-funded research program and has prompted a wave of dizzying innovation and growth over the past three decades.
Below is an artist’s rendering of the Sunway TaihuLight super computer’s general architecture.
