News that China now owns the world's fastest supercomputer, the 93 petaFLOPS "Sunway TaihuLight," has ignited a race among both countries to build the world's first exascale supercomputer.

When its built, an exascale supercomputer will automatically become the world's fastest since one exaFLOPS is equivalent to 10¹⁸ or 1,000 petaFLOPS. One petaFLOP is equivalent to 10¹⁵.

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China plans to have its first exaFLOPS machine up and running by 2020 while the United States sees 2023 as its deadline. But these deadlines are arbitrary.

China plans to call its exascale supercomputer, Tianhe-3, continuing 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 United States has a plan for coordinating exascale development. Its goal is an exascale system capable "100 times the performance of current 10 petaFLOPS systems across a range of applications representing government needs."

Analysts, however, noted that China is emphasizing "peak performance" for its exascale supercomputer while the U.S. prefers "sustained performance." The U.S. goal will take longer to achieve but will be the more practical.

China's state-funded push to be recognized as a world leader in science and technology got a huge boost with an announcement by Beijing that Chinese scientists have built the world's fastest supercomputer, and one that doesn't use any microchips made in the United States.

This Chinese supercomputer named "Sunway TaihuLight" scored an unprecedented 93 petaFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark. This performance is nearly three times better than the previous number one system, China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which was the world's fastest for past three years.

Sunway TaihuLight is also five times faster than Titan, the 17 petaFLOPS machine at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which is the fastest supercomputer in the United States.

Sunway TaihuLight also has a theoretical peak performance of 125.4 petaFLOPS. It is the first system to exceed 100 petaFLOPS.

The machine is a monolithic system with 10.65 million compute cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. There is no U.S.-made supercomputer system that comes close to the performance of Sunway TaihuLight.

The LINPACK benchmarks are used to benchmark and rank supercomputers for the TOP500 list. A petaFLOPS supercomputer has a sustained speed of 10¹⁵ FLOPS or one thousand trillion (one quadrillion) FLOPS.

FLOPS stands for "floating-point operations per second" and is a measure of computer performance.

TaihuLight, which is installed at China's National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, uses ShenWei CPUs developed by Jiangnan Computing Research Lab in Wuxi. The operating system is a Linux-based Chinese system called Sunway Raise.

China describes Sunway TaihuLight as a "domestically designed supercomputer," meaning the supercomputer was built it in-house and doesn't use processor or accelerator technology from U.S. companies like Intel and Nvidia.

Sunway TaihuLight is currently running "sizeable applications" that include advanced manufacturing, Earth systems modeling, life science and big data.

The U.S. banned the sale of supercomputer microchips to China because it claimed China was using its Tianhe-2 supercomputer for nuclear explosive testing activities. Tianhe-2, which has a peak performance of 54.9 petaFLOPS, uses Intel Xeon processors.

TagsSunway TaihuLight, Supercomputer, National Supercomputing Center, china, FLOPS