Earlier this week, the International Supercomputer Conference in Germany has announced that newly built Chinese supercomputer is the World’s fastest computer.

The Chinese supercomputer is made by National Supercomputing Center and called Sunway TaihuLight. It outperforms the Tianhe-2 by just three factors. Sunway TaihuLight reached 93 petaflops (calculations per second) and has a theoretical top speed of 125.4 petaflops. In comparison with Tianhe-2, which had been the world's fastest for three consecutive years, it has speeds of 33.9 petaflops.

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The system has memory of 1.3PB, or 32GB for each node. It comprises nearly 41,000 chips, each with 260 small calculating engines called processor cores that allow designers to pack 10.65 million cores into 40 cabinets.

Sunway TaihuLight is installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China. While Tianhe-2 uses Intel processors, Sunway TaihuLight was built entirely with processors designed and manufactured in China. Sunway TaihuLight uses a custom interconnect based on PCIe 3.0 technology.

Each node in Sunway TaihuLight has one SW26010 chip, a new version of the ShenWei processor that produces speeds of 3 teraflop/s with 260 cores. This is a 1.45GHz 64-bit RISC processor.

Sunway TaihuLight marks the first time China has taken the top speed ranking without using American semiconductor technology. Previously, the No. 1 system used chips from Intel Corp., which was prevented from sending chips to upgrade the system by a U.S. export ban last year. In another sign of its heavy investments in the field, China for the first time placed more machines than the U.S. on the so-called Top500 list, by 167 to 165.

“As the first No. 1 system of China that is completely based on homegrown processors, the Sunway TaihuLight system demonstrates the significant progress that China has made in the domain of designing and manufacturing large-scale computation systems,” Center Director Guangwen Yang told TOP500, curator of the bi-annual supercomputer rankings.

In recent years, both the Chinese government as well as private selector companies like Baidu and Alibaba have invested heavily in powerful computing systems that are capable of dealing with the vast quantities of data today’s applications generate.

Tagschina, Sunway TaihuLight, Supercomputer, World's Fastest Supercomputer, Tianhe-2, Supercomputer Conference, Sunway TaihuLight 93 petaflops