If anyone cares, we’re falling behind in the computer race

It should have been a Sputnik mo- ment, which anyone of a certain age recognizes as an event that makes the nation snap to attention and ask itself when it lost the lead.

And yet, the announcement that China — not the United States — now has the fastest supercomputer in the world has produced not an outcry, but a ho-hum as quiet as a supercomputer running at 2.507 petaflops (that’s 2,507 trillion calculations per second for those who are counting).

The Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, was the blastoff heard round the world.

Until that moment, the United States, only 12 years from the triumphant Allied defeat of Germany and Japan, felt safe in its perception of technological superiority. And most of the world saw it that way too.

But if the Russians could launch the first man-made object into Earth orbit, what else could they do? And so, the space race was on in earnest.

The United States not only asked what its current scientists could do, it began asking what the next generation of scientists would be able to do. Improvements in science and math education were demanded at every level, from elementary school through postgraduate work at the nation’s most prestigious universities.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower started what John F. Kennedy vowed to accomplish, putting a man on the moon. Neither Eisenhower nor Kennedy lived to hear Neil Armstrong’s announcement that he had just taken a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind. But it is an amazing testament to U.S. determination that the United States won the race to the moon less than 12 years after its Sputnik wake-up call.

Side benefits

And who would question that the Sputnik moment led to the development of a generation of young geniuses and a U.S. computer and software industry that was considered without a peer — until now.

The computer assembled at the National University of Defense Technology is known as Tianhe-1A and has 1.4 times the power of the most powerful U.S. super computer, the Cray XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

And while it’s true that both computers are built with U.S. components — the Tianhe-1A depends on Intel and Nvidia chips, the Jaguar on AMD — it’s no secret that the Chinese do not intend to depend on American suppliers forever.

China views the race to build the world’s fastest computer as a matter of national pride, but as history shows, nations that make a serious commitment to excelling in science reap rewards that pay off over generations. But the payoff isn’t infinite.

Has the United States has become so jaded — so comfortable in a sense that it is simply destined to be great — that it can no longer hear a wake-up call? The lack of reaction to the Tianhe-1A announcement suggests so.