“Made in China” label is starting to get a good reputation as the fastest supercomputer in the world comes from there! #hardwaremagic
Sunway TaihuLight can do about 93 quadrillion calculations per second (you’ll also read about them under the name of petaflops), being equipped with 41,000 chips, each with 260 processor cores. This is not an easy thing to do, as you can imagine, yet TaihuLight is incredibly efficient, using only 1.3 petabytes of RAM; that means it consumes just 15.3 megawatts of power!
To put these numbers into perspective, consider that all this package makes this supercomputer five times more powerful than the fastest US system. Fifteen years ago, there were zero Chinese supercomputers in Top 500, now there are 167, more than US by two. By the way, the first two places in the top supercomputers worlwide are taken by China, US taking 3rd place. Not only that, but this time China can boast with a machine made entirely there, with their own processors.
The second computer in the top, Tianhe-2, was built with Intel processors, back when US government allowed shipping in China. From April 2015, there’s an official ban in place, given the high stakes of exporting such a technology. A supercomputer can have a crucial role in research, but also cybersecurity and nuclear weaponry.
That said, TaihuLight will be used in manufacturing, science, and earth system modeling.
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