The Biggest Hollywood Films Originated from China

eatup · Jun 15, 2016

Supreme Leader Snoke in deep meditation (or at least where his character design came from --- the main villain in Heaven Sword & Dragon Saber, the basis of the STAR WARS Sequel Trilogy is a Shaolin monk):

eatup · Jun 15, 2016

Btw, I don't know why we're stuck at 10 posts/page. But, you can find an alternate version of this thread here:

http://www.spcnet.tv/forums/showthread.php/39890-Made-in-China-Hollywood-s-biggest-films?p=1127226

(It makes more sense pictorially when you can view 20 posts/page...)

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eatup · Jun 16, 2016

China is re-making Legend of The Condor Heroes (TV series) for release in 2017. The story is about two "sworn brothers" born at the same time, QiGon Jinn and Anakin Skywalker. QiGon is the good guy, but Anakin soon turns to the dark side.

In STAR WARS, LucasArts made all sorts of creative changes to the original story, such as QiGon already an adult when he met boy Anakin, and also QiGon being relatively weak, defeated by Darth Maul, whereas in Condor Heroes, his counterpart is near invincible.

A few screen shots.

(This person played Anakin in the 1982 adaptation, but now reprises the role of QiGon's father in law in the 2017 adaptation)

(Anakin's 1st Master. In the original story, Anakin had a [Dark Side] female tutor, not ObiWan)

This is the most "official" unofficial thread for the TV series still being filmed for late 2016/2017 release:

http://www.spcnet.tv/forums/showthr...en-Li-Yi-Tong-Chen-Xing-Xu/page2#.V2IUmjOliYA

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eatup · Jun 16, 2016

QiGon's romantic interest:

(Sorry to disappoint STAR WARS fans, but in the original story, the "Jedis" weren't celibate beings like LucasArts made them out to be...)

eatup · Jun 16, 2016

Real set filming locations in real weather conditions (ie. not cgi snow):

eatup · Jun 16, 2016

From what I've been reading, this production company is committed to adapting ten of Jin Yong's works (the author of Condor Trilogy).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jin_Yong

(This man singlehandedly invented ALL STAR WARS Episodes past, present, and future in his 20's/30's and became famous and rich for doing so --- The equivalent of Tolkien or J.K Rowling in China)

So, I'm predicting the following release schedule:

2016-2017 Legend of the Condor Heroes (STAR WARS Ep 1-3 are loosely based on this)

2019-2020 Return of the Condor Heroes (STAR WARS Ep 1-6's main inspiration)

2022-2023 Heaven Sword & Dragon Saber (STAR WARS Ep 7-9's origin)

2025-2026 The Demi Gods & Semi Devils (STAR WARS Ep 10-12's story??)

2028-2029 Swordsman/The Smiling Proud Wanderer (STAR WARS Ep 13-15's derivation??)

Anyways, here it is again, the most "official" unofficial thread you'll find about this subject on the internet:

http://www.spcnet.tv/forums/showthr...en-Li-Yi-Tong-Chen-Xing-Xu/page2#.V2IUmjOliYA

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eatup · Jun 16, 2016

A few terminologies/conversions for the uninitiated (in case they're confused about Legend of the Condor Heroes in the above thread):

QiGon Jinn = Guo Jing (turn the 'u' upside down, move it behind the 'o' and you get QiGon's name)

QiGon Jinn's romantic interest = Huang Rong

Anakin Skywalker = Yang Kang

Anakin's romantic interest = Mu Nianci

Anakin's 1st Dark Side female tutor = Mei Chaofeng

ObiWan = Ouyang Feng (just like Disney did a gender swap for Ep VII main characters, LucasArts made an age swap wrt ObiWan & QiGon. QiGon is the young man, while Obi is the old "uncle" in Condor Heroes. Obi's counterpart is one of "Five Greats" [ie. Elders] characters in Condor Heroes)

Yoda = Hong Qigong (a bearded, but playful short old man; one of "Five Greats" characters in Condor Heroes)

Full list of Legend of the Condor Heroes characters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Legend_of_the_Condor_Heroes_characters

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eatup · Jun 16, 2016

Btw, reason why I'm even posting all of the above here is:

There will never be a remake to the God-awful STAR WARS prequels, at least not until Disney finishes milking the Franchise dry.

Besides, IMO The Condor Heroes story is far superior to what LucasArts delivered, not in technical execution, but b/c the original story is far more complex (ie. the adaptation to be released in 2017 will be at least be 45 hours long [of TV time of course]) and has far more characters that were left out of the "LucasArts" edition.

The other part is, China loves to remake each story every 9 years. So imagine that, probably around 2025-2026 another production company will come along with their version of Legend of the Condor Heroes, and another one in 2035 and another one in 2044, etc...

eatup · Jun 22, 2016

Since this thread is about China, and this is a computer forum, I'm going to go ahead and post this here:

http://www.wired.com/2016/06/fastest-supercomputer-sunway-taihulight/

China's New Supercomputer Puts the US Even Further Behind

This week, the China’s Sunway TaihuLight officially became the fastest supercomputer in the world. The previous champ? Also from China. What used to be an arms race for supercomputing primacy among technological nations has turned into a blowout.

The Sunway TaihuLight is indeed a monster: theoretical peak performance of 125 petaflops, 10,649,600 cores, and 1.31 petabytes of primary memory. That’s not just “big.” Former Indiana Pacers center Rik Smits is big. This is, like, mountain big. Jupiter big.

But TaihuLight’s abilities are matched only by the ambition that drove its creation. Fifteen years ago, China claimed zero of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. Today, it not only has more than everyone else—including the United States—but its best machine boasts speeds five times faster the best the US can muster. And, in a first, it achieves those speeds with purely China-made chips.

Think of TaihuLight, then, not in terms of power but of significance. It’s loaded with it, not only for what it can do, but how it does it.

The Super Supercomputer

If you think of a supercomputer as a souped-up version of what you’re playing EVE Online with at home, well, as it turns out you’re not entirely wrong. “At one level they’re not very different from your desktop system,” says Michael Papka, director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (home to Mira, the world’s sixth-fastest supercomputer). “They have a processor that looks very similar to the one in a laptop or desktop system—there’s just a lot of them connected together.”

Your MacBook, for example, uses four cores; Mira harnesses just under 800,000. It uses those them to simulate and study everything from weather patterns to the origins of the universe. The faster the supercomputer, the more precise the models and simulations.

On that basis alone, TaihuLight is a singular accomplishment. Its 10.6 million cores are more than three times the previous leader, China’s Tianhe-2, and nearly 20 times the fastest U.S. supercomputer, Titan, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “It’s running very high rates of execution speed, very good efficiency, and very good power efficiency,” says University of Tennessee computer scientist Jack Dongarra. “It’s really quite impressive.”

If anyone’s qualified to say so, it’s Dongarra. He created the benchmark by which supercomputers were first compared in 1993 by TOP500, the organization that still ranks them today, and published the first independent evaluation [PDF] of TaihuLight’s capabilities.

Still, hardware’s not everything. Because supercomputers run specialized tasks, they require specialized software. “You can use a factory as an example,” says Papka. “A lot of people are working on putting a car together at the same time, but they’re all working in a coordinated manner. People who write programs for supercomputers have to get all of the pieces working together.”

TaihuLight passes that test, too. In fact, three of the six finalists for a prestigious high-performance computing award are applications built to run on TaihuLight. Aside from relatively slow memory—a conscious trade off to save money and power consumption—this rig is ready to go to work. “This is not a stunt machine,” says Dongarra. And it’s years ahead of anything the US has.

A Command Line Lead

TaihuLight is faster than anything scheduled to come online in the US until 2018, when three Department of Energy sites will each receive a machine expected to range from 150 to 200 petaflops. That’s ahead of where China is now—but two years is half an eternity in computer-time. That the lead has gotten so large galls some lawmakers for reasons both political and practical. Legislation exists calling for a supercomputer funding boost, but has spent the last year mired in the Senate.

“Massive domestic gains in computing power are necessary to address the national security, scientific, and health care challenges of the future,” says Rep. Randy Hultgren, a Republican from Illinois whose American Super Computing Leadership Act has twice been passed by the House of Representatives. “It is increasingly evident that America is losing our lead.” Meanwhile the DOE is working on innovating with the budget it has.

The other significant TaihuLight achievement stings US interests even more, because it’s political. China’s last champ, Tianhe-2, had Intel inside. But in February of 2015, the Department of Commerce, citing national security concerns—supercomputers excel at crunching metadata for the NSA and their foreign equivalents—banned the sale of Intel Xeon processor to Chinese supercomputer labs.

Rather than slow the rate of Chinese supercomputer technology, the move appears to have had quite the opposite effect. “I believe the Chinese government put more research funding into the projects to develop and put in place indigenous processors,” Dongarra says. “The result of that, in some sense, is this machine today.”

A Race Worth Winning

Broadly, it’s true that better supercomputers benefit the whole world, assuming scientists get to work on them. It doesn’t exactly matter what flavor the chips are. “On some level, it’s a trophy that you put on your mantel,” Dongarra says. “But what’s more important is what kind of science it does, what kind of discoveries you make.”

TaihuLight’s stewards tell Dongarra that they’re putting all that power toward advanced manufacturing, Earth-system modeling and weather forecasting, life science, and big data analytics. That sounds like a broad range, but it’s just a small slice of what supercomputers’ capabilities. “Each time we make an increase, we can add more science to the problem,” Papka says. “For the foreseeable future, until we can model the real world on a quark-for-quark basis, we’ll need more powerful computers.”

And those computers are coming—especially if the US gets serious about catching up.
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Imagine that, the world's top-ranked, miles ahead of the US, and... entirely made in China. They did invent STAR WARS over a decade before the very first Episode IV came out in 1977. China also made up 30% of the global economic output at one point in history...

Anyways, I've gathered enough computer hardware to last me the next two decades. I hope that by the time I come out of PC hibernation then, some interesting Chinese consumer chips and hardware will be made available as alternatives to the current Intel-Microsoft cartel that currently dominates the consumers market...

eatup · Jun 22, 2016

http://www.techgig.com/tech-news/ed...exascale-by-2020-three-years-before-U-S-46462

China claims exascale by 2020, three years before U.S.

China has set 2020 as the date for delivering an exascale system, the next major milestone in supercomputing performance. This is three years ahead of the U.S. roadmap.

This claim is from China's National University of Defense Technology, as reported Thursday by China's official news agency, Xinhua.

This system will be called Tianhe-3, following a naming convention that began in 2010 when China announced its first petaflop-scale system, Tianhe-1. The first petascale system was developed in the U.S. in 2008.

The U.S. roadmap calls for delivering an exascale system -- capable of 1,000 petaflops -- in 2023.

But it's not clear just what China will deliver in 2020. Theoretically, an exascale computer could be built today but it wouldn't be practical. The power needs may be in excess of what the U.S. believes is possible, power-wise, by 2023: A system that uses 20 to 30 megawatts.

"It's entirely probable that one or more governments will deploy supercomputers with hypothetical peak performance of an exaflop by 2020," said Steve Conway, a high-performance computing analyst at IDC. "An exaflop is an arbitrary milestone, a nice round figure with the kind of symbolic lure the four-minute mile once held."

But what will China be capable of delivering in 2020?

The first stage will likely be peak exaflop performance, and then a Linpack test making make it eligible for ranking on the Top 500 supercomputing list, said Conway.

But the measure "that counts most, but will be likely be celebrated least," said Conway, "is sustained exaflop performance on a full, challenging 64-bit application."

That third stage probably won't happen until the 2022 to 2024 timeframe, he said.

That's the timeframe the U.S. has set, and its definition of exascale is sustained performance.

The White House, in an executive order last year, released a plan for coordinating exascale development and defined an exascale system capable of "100 times the performance of current 10-petaflop systems across a range of applications representing government needs."

The U.S. emphasis is on application performance, not on a peak performance record. Even if China does meet its 2020 goal, the debate will be over the usefulness of the machine. Nonetheless, China will likely use the machine to underscore its science advancement.

China has been leading the Top 500 list with its 34-petaflop Tianhe-2 system, but that list is due to be updated next week at the ISC High Performance Conference in Frankfurt, Germany.
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OK. So the roadmap is like this:

June 2016 - Sunway Taihulight supercomputer (China) @ 93 Petaflops (125 Petaflops theoretical max)

2018 - 150-200 Petaflops supercomputer (USA)

2020 - 1,000 Petaflops (Exascale) supercomputer (China)

2023 - 1,000 Petaflops (Exascale) supercomputer (USA)

History just repeats itself. China had/will have everything first, including the story base/inspiration/design for STAR WARS, Avatar, etc...

eatup · Jun 22, 2016

(... continued from the previous post)

DR. GRACE AUGUSTINE: What we think we know - is that there's some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora... That's more connections than the human brain. You get it? It's a network - a global network. And the Na'vi can access it - they can upload and download data - memories - at sites like the one you just destroyed.
Click to expand...

(Image above: An engineer shows the many-core processor of Sunway TaihuLight, a new Chinese supercomputer, in Wuxi, east China's Jiangsu Province, June 16, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Xiang))

(Image above: National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi)

eatup · Jun 22, 2016

(... continued from above)

Top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world (as of June 2016):

eatup · Jun 22, 2016

(... continued from above)

Sunway-TaihuLight: An apt name for an HPC that's set on the side of Lake Taihu

eatup · Jun 22, 2016

eatup · Jun 22, 2016

(... continued from previous post)

Sunway-TaihuLight outperforms Tianhe-2 as world's fastest supercomputer
Source: Xinhua | 2016-06-20 15:56:14 | Editor: huaxia

NANJING, June 20 (Xinhua) -- China's new supercomputing system, Sunway-TaihuLight, was named the world's fastest computer at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany on Monday.

The National Supercomputing Center was also unveiled Monday in Wuxi, east China's Jiangsu Province, where the new-generation supercomputer is installed.

With processing capacity of 125.436 petaflops (PFlops) per second, which means it can perform quadrillions of calculations per second at peak performance, Sunway-TaihuLight is the first supercomputer to achieve speeds in excess of 100 PFlops.

The computing power of the supercomputer is provided by a China-developed many-core CPU chip, which is just 25 square cm.
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eatup · Jun 25, 2016

What is a Neural Processing Unit (NPU):

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-neural-processing.htm

What is Neural Processing?

Neural processing originally referred to the way the brain works, but the term is more typically used to describe a computer architecture that mimics that biological function. In computers, neural processing gives software the ability to adapt to changing situations and to improve its function as more information becomes available. Neural processing is used in software to do tasks such as recognize a human face, predict the weather, analyze speech patterns, and learn new strategies in games.

The human brain is composed of approximately 100 billion neurons. These neurons are nerve cells that individually serve a simple function of processing and transmitting information. When the nerve cells transmit and process in clusters, called a neural network, the results are complex – such as creating and storing memory, processing language, and reacting to sudden movement.

Artificial neural processing mimics this process at a simpler level. A small processing unit, called a neuron or node, performs a simple task of processing and transmitting data. As the simple processing units combine basic information through connectors, the information and processing becomes more complex. Unlike traditional computer processors, which need a human programmer to input new information, neural processors can learn on their own once they are programmed.

For example, a neural processor can improve at checkers. Just like a human brain, the computer learns that certain moves by an opponent are made to create traps. Basic programming might allow the computer to fall for the trap the first time. The more often a certain trap appears, however, the greater attention the computer pays to that data and begins to react accordingly.

Neural programmers call the increasing attention that the computer pays to certain outcomes "weight." Traditional processing would provide the computer only with the basic rules of the game and a limited number of strategies. Neural processing, by gathering data and paying greater attention to more important information, learns better strategies as time goes on.

The power of neural processing is in its flexibility. In the brain, information is presented as an electrochemical impulse – a small jolt or a chemical signal. In artificial neural processing, the information is presented as a numeric value. That value determines whether the artificial neuron goes active or stays dormant, and it also determines where it sends its signal. If a certain checker is moved to a certain square, for instance, the neural network reads that information as numeric data. That data is compared against a growing amount of information, which in turn creates an action or output.
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eatup · Jun 25, 2016

DR. GRACE AUGUSTINE: What we think we know - is that there's some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora... That's more connections than the human brain. You get it? It's a network - a global network. And the Na'vi can access it - they can upload and download data - memories - at sites like the one you just destroyed.
Click to expand...

After 5 years of research: China unveils first embedded neural network processing unit

http://en.people.cn/n3/2016/0622/c90000-9075892.html

China has launched mass production of the country’s newly-unveiled first ever embedded neural network processing unit (NPU), marking one more major breakthrough in the country’s NPU research and development.

The VC0758 NPU, developed by China’s leading video technology supplier Vimicro is based on a data driven parallel computing model, which can greatly improve the smart chip’s computational ability at a lower power consumption rate, said Zhang Yundong, executive director of the Vimicro State Key Laboratory on digital multimedia chip technology.

Vimicro on Monday announced that it has realized mass production of the VC0758 NPU after five years of research, suggesting that China is now one of the countries with the most advanced artificial intellectual technology in deep learning based on a data driven parallel computing model, according China National Radio (CNR).

Zhang added that the chip is especially skilled in processing multimedia data such as videos and images. Its capabilities will especially be brought into full play when it is used for embedded computer vision applications, CNR reported.

The CNR noted that the smart chip will give a major boost to improvement for China’s video surveillance industry and can help the country to establish a leading position in the world.

According to China Central Television, the VC0758 will be widely employed in drone, intelligent drive assistance systems or in the field of robot vision.
Click to expand...

eatup · Jun 25, 2016

(... continued from above)

China unveils first embedded neural network processing unit

China has launched mass production of the country’s newly-unveiled first ever embedded neural network processing unit (NPU), marking one more major breakthrough in the country’s NPU research and development.

The VC0758 NPU, developed by China’s leading video technology supplier Vimicro is based on a data driven parallel computing model, which can greatly improve the smart chip’s computational ability at a lower power consumption rate, said Zhang Yundong, executive director of the Vimicro State Key Laboratory on digital multimedia chip technology.

Vimicro on Monday announced that it has realized mass production of the VC0758 NPU after five years of research, suggesting that China is now one of the countries with the most advanced artificial intellectual technology in deep learning based on a data driven parallel computing model, according China National Radio (CNR).

Zhang added that the chip is especially skilled in processing multimedia data such as videos and images. Its capabilities will especially be brought into full play when it is used for embedded computer vision applications, CNR reported.

The CNR noted that the smart chip will give a major boost to improvement for China’s video surveillance industry and can help the country to establish a leading position in the world.

According to China Central Television, the VC0758 will be widely employed in drone, intelligent drive assistance systems or in the field of robot vision.
Click to expand...

Various pictures [of Shanghai/China] taken NOT by a helicopter, but a commercial drone that anyone can buy, such as this (pics look best at 50% zoom):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdlmoLAbbiQ (The Verge: This is the most amazing [Chinese] drone we've seen yet)