More Nationalistic
Given that Taiwan is the home of TSMC, I'm surprised that there isn't a Taiwanese supercomputer they could have used.
Or, if they're looking for budget iron, what about (South) Korea?
Taiwan CWB map Fujitsu got a big wad of yen last year from the Japanese government to build the K supercomputer, which until this month was the fastest parallel supercomputer in the world. Now Fujitsu is on a tear to commercialize the supercluster, which it sells with upgraded processors as the PrimeHPC FX10. So it was quite …
Ehm... what (mainland) Chinese hardware could they even have chosen, really? I am not aware of any "homegrown" PRC HPC systems. A commodity Intel CPU + Nvidia GPU cluster taped together with a Chinese interconnect is not exactly a homegrown Chinese supercomputer in the same way that a Fujitsu CPU + Fujitsu interconnect system is a homegrown Japanese system. Getting one of those hybrid systems from the PRC when they could easily make one themselves or get it from any other industrial nation seems like a slightly far-fetched (and dumb) idea.
Paris Hilton because she seems about as relevant to this Taiwanese supercomputer deal as any imaginary Red Chinese HPC contenders.
The Mainland has a system with custom processors and custom interconnects in the top 100 - the ShenWei SW1600-based "Bluelight" machine. The cores themselves are supposedly distant derivatives of early Alpha cores, fabbed at 65nm, with 16 to a chip and clocked at 1GHz.
That being said, I don't see anything with it that's inherently more appealing than Fujitsu's pseudo-vector-processor system.