McClatchy-Tribune News Service (MCT)
The following editorial appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on Monday, Nov. 1:
America’s smug sense of technological superiority took a hit last week with China’s news that it has built the fastest supercomputer ever made.
The Tianhe-1A can make roughly 2,500 trillion calculations per second. We’ll need some engineer to come up with a clever analogy to put that into perspective, but for now, let’s just say it’s really, really fast.
Breakthroughs like this have generally been ours. So how worried should the United States be about China’s accomplishment? Very – but not for the obvious reason.
Supercomputers are used to analyze massive amounts of data and simulate ultra-complex financial, scientific and defense problems. So China’s breakthrough is significant, but its supercomputers are still powered by American chips. The Tianhe-1A uses thousands of Nvidia GPUs (graphic processing units) and Intel CPUs (central processing units) to blow away its competition.
The reason the United States should be concerned is that this illustrates China’s commitment to developing the world’s greatest collection of computer scientists. This country, meanwhile, continues to trail other developed nations in math and science. America’s 15-year-olds ranked 25th in math and 21st in science in recent world rankings.
As Boston University computer science professor Azer Bestavros told Forbes, “The much more important question is whether we are investing in the education and training of the next generation of computer scientists who will use … such machines.”
We know of no respected tech or education expert who believes the answer to that question is yes.