Chinese Made 93-Petaflop Supercomputer ‘Sunway TaihuLight’ is World’s Fastest on Latest TOP500 list
Super-computing or High-Performance Computing plays ever more important roles in industrial fields as well as in basic research. Based upon the history of supercomputers in the last few decades, there was tremendous growth in the capacity of supercomputers.
Advance simulation technology gives us the problem-solving technique for complex and nonlinear systems with huge degrees of freedom, which appear in natural science, engineering, socio-economic problems, and so on.
Large-scale high-speed simulation technology and high-performance computing as its basis is the key to scientific and technological development in the 21st century.
Performing 93 quadrillion calculations per second, a new Chinese supercomputer called ‘Sunway TaihuLight’ at the newest edition of the TOP500 list was announced Monday, June 20, at ISC 2016 in Frankfurt. It dethroned China’s Tianhe-2 from the top in a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Image credit: Jack Dongarra, Report on the Sunway TaihuLight System, June 2016
Supercomputers, long a field dominated by the United States, are used for weather forecasting, designing nuclear weapons, and other specialized purposes.
It marks the first time China has taken the top speed ranking without using U.S. semiconductor technology. The prior 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.
Image credit: cri.cn
Chinese Sunway Taihulight
Sunway TaihuLight, with 10,649,600 computing cores comprising 40,960 nodes, is twice as fast and three times as efficient as Tianhe-2, which has a performance of 33.86 quadrillion calculations per second, or petaflop/s.
Source: Insidehpc
The new system was developed by the Chinese National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi of Jiangsu, an eastern coastal province of China.
“It’s a trend with China,” Jack Dongarra, professor of the University of Tennessee and editor of the list, told Xinhua in an email. “They had zero systems in 2001 and today they surpass the United States. No other nation has seen such rapid growth,” as reported by Shanghai Daily.
According to TOP500 author Jack Dongarra, three scientific simulation codes run on TaihuLight have been chosen as Gordon Bell Prize finalists, two of which have managed to reach a sustained performance of 30 to 40 petaflops, reports TOP500.
