China’s ‘Sunway TaihuLight System’ Beats US In Supercomputers, Based On Top 500 List

Supercomputers will have a new member through China's first supercomputer that was developed with processors manufactured and designed in the People's Republic. According to reports, it has been listed as the most powerful system in the world so far.

The news on the new supercomputer arrives as China beats the US for the first time in the performance and the number of systems on the latest Top 500 ranking.

Supercomputer Sunway TaihuLight has reportedly hit 93 petaflops per second, based on a Linpack benchmark, and peak performance of 125.4 Pflops per second at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi.  It uses 40,960 Sunway SW26010 processors, which was developed by the Shanghai High Performance IC Design Center.

China's Tianhe-2 has already claimed the title for the fastest supercomputer in the world for the past three years. However, it was developed through an interconnect chip created in the country and through Intel processors, Cray reported.

To compare, the upcoming large acquisition of the US Department of Energy for a supercomputer is expected to be about 200 Pflops per second and will not be until 2017 as production will start in 2018. According to computer science professor Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee and also a co-author of Top500 list, the Sunway TaihuLight system is showing a notable development that China has created in manufacturing and designing of the large-scale computation system.

Also mentioned in Dongarra's 18-page report about Sunway system are the large applications and the Gordon Bell award contender applications that run on the system, which he thinks are impressive and indication of the system's capability of running real applications, and not only a stunt machine.

The latest ranking of China is the result of its focused investment in supercomputing for the last three to five years, as compared to the US whose spending has plummeted. Meanwhile, deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Horst Simon and also a co-author of the Top 500 list, believes that US will return to the game with projects like the National Strategic Computing Initiative. He also added that the contest to bring the first exascale-class system has not been tight as it is now, according to Encyclopedia.