China on Monday revealed its latest supercomputer, a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. This follows a U.S. government decision last year to deny China access to Intel's fastest microprocessors. There is no U.S.-made system that comes close to the performance of China's new system, the Sunway TaihuLight. Its theoretical peak performance is 124.5 petaflops, according to the latest biannual release today of the world's Top500 supercomputers. It is the first system to exceed 100 petaflops. A petaflop equals one thousand trillion (one quadrillion) sustained floating-point operations per second. The most important thing about Sunway TaihuLight
China has built the world's fastest supercomputer using locally made microchips, a survey said Monday, the first time the country has taken the top spot without using US technology. The Sunway TaihuLight machine is twice as fast as the previous number one, which was built in China with chips from US firm Intel, the Top500 survey of supercomputers said on its website www.top500.org. China also has more top-ranked supercomputers than the US for the first time since the survey began, with 167 compared to 165.
China is putting the U.S. firmly in the shade in the battle for supercomputer supremacy. For the first time ever, China has taken the lead in the number of supercomputers on a closely watched list of the 500 fastest systems on the planet. It has 167, overtaking the U.S. at 165, according to the researchers who compile the ranking. China has also strengthened its grip on the top of the list, with its machines taking both first and second place. And the new supercomputer that has leaped in at No. 1 -- known as Sunway TaihuLight -- is built completely on homegrown processors rather than drawing on U.S. chip technology. The top spot had previously been held since 2013 by China's Tianhe-2, which was
China has built the world's fastest supercomputer, capable of making 93 quadrillion calculations a second. The Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which is located at the state-funded Chinese Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai in eastern China, is more than twice as powerful as previous record-holder Tianhe-2, according to TOP500, a research organization that ranks the powerful computers twice a year. The milestone comes a year after the United States barred exports of computer chips to China for use in its supercomputers, citing concerns that the machines had been used in "nuclear explosive activities." In turn, by ramping up development of its own chips, China has come to surpass the US' own achievements in supercomputing: the top-placing American creation, the Department of Energy's Titan, secured third place ranking on TOP500's list, below China's two-record breaking supercomputers.
