Sunway TaihuLight new supercomputer is the most powerful in the world. It carries over 93 million billion calculations per second with over 40,000 using Chinese processors.
The new world champion of supercomputers is China. This is what appears from new ranking published by the site Top500.org, which follows the international conference dedicated to supercomputers. The entrance to Sunway TaihuLight (this is the name of the Chinese model) topping the list is sensational, for several reasons.
Firstly because, as we said, it is Chinese, specifically Wuxi, a city industrial province of Jiangsu. We are far from big companies or laboratories of US searches. However, this new entry in the first place, second place is held by Tianhe-2 , another Chinese model (originally from Canton), does not believe that China tumbles just in the world of supercomputers. The rise of these ultra powerful machines has been initiated since early 2000. It has accelerated rapidly developed in 2010 for the first time, a great Chinese computer ranked first classical Top500.
Chinese processors almost three times more powerful
Sunway TaihuLight hits hard and brand spirits for several reasons. The first is that it does not use Intel processors, as is the case for 5 of the top 10 supercomputers, Sunway TaihuLight owes its performance to the use of 40,960 Chinese processors, the Shenwei 26010, each with 260 cores .
Table of test results issued by Top500 speaks for itself. Sunway TaihuLight crushes his older Tianhe-2, Number 2, with a power level almost three times higher. So, with 10.65 million cores (approximately), this supercomputer is capable of performing more than 93 million billion operations per second, or 93 petaflops. Number 2, Tianhe-2 achieves 33.86 petaflops.
The country had initially considered simply increasing the computing capacity of its computer Tianhe-2, but the US government had banned the export of processors. The US government suspected effect in China of using the capacity of its supercomputers to develop nuclear weapons and that these exports posed a risk to national security.
For the Chinese the problem of the origin of chips therefore not pose longer if the new supercomputer actually keeps his promises: fully designed and developed by local suppliers, it will not have to fear a blockage from foreign suppliers. Officially, China says the new supercomputer will be used for manufacturing activities, biological research and ground modelling.