China has retained the title of having the world's fastest supercomputer for the seventh year running. However, what makes this achievement monumental is the fact that the microchips and technology used in the supercomputer are all made in the country."Sunway TaihuLight," this year's champion, is followed by last year's champion which also happens to be Chinese but is maintained by engineers in the U.S. and Germany.

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Sunway TaihuLight,  located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi, west of Shanghai, was developed by China's National Research Centre of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology using entirely Chinese-designed processors.

It boasts of a massive processing capability of 93 petaflops or 93 quadrillion calculations per second. According to the TOP500, it has a theoretical speed of 124.5 petaflops, making it the first supercomputer to surpass the 100 petaflop barrier. One petaflop equals to one thousand trillion (one quadrillion) sustained floating-point operations per second.

Japan ranked number three on the list while countries like Germany, Switzerland, and Saudi Arabia completed the rest of the top 10. China has a large representation on the list with 167 supercomputers. This record is closely followed by the U.S., which has 165 and Japan with 29 ranks third.

Sunway TaihuLight is mainly intended to be used for research and scientific purposes including weather, life sciences, advanced manufacturing and data analytics. It was officially launched at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt by the director of the Wuxi center, Guangwen Yang last Tuesday.

"As the first No. 1 system of China that is completely based on home grown processors, the Sunway TaihuLight system demonstrates the significant progress that China has made in the domain of designing and manufacturing large-scale computation systems," Yang is quoted saying.

Ten years ago, China only had 28 systems on the list with none of them making the cut even in the top 30, but now it has raced ahead of its main competitors like the U.S. and Japan. 

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