China’s Homegrown 100 Pflops Supercomputer Leads Top500 List

China’s Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which can achieve a peak performance of up to 125 petaflops, is officially the world’s fastest.

AsianScientist (Jul. 4, 2016) – China’s Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which can achieve a peak performance of up to 125 petaflops, is officially the world’s fastest.

The supercomputer, which took the pole position on the 47th edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers, was developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and is operated by the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi (NSCC-Wuxi).

It is built entirely using processors designed and made in China, unlike predecessors Tianhe-2 and Tianhe-1A, which use Intel Xeon chips from the US.

At 93 petaflop/s on the LINPACK benchmark, Sunway TaihuLight displaces Tianhe-2, which posted a LINPACK performance of 33.86 petaflop/s. Tianhe-2 has claimed the number one spot on the past six TOP500 lists.

Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is now the number three system. It achieved 17.59 petaflop/s.

The latest list marks the first time since the inception of the TOP500 that the US is not home to the largest number of systems. With a surge in industrial and research installations registered over the last few years, China leads with 167 systems and the US is second with 165. China also leads the performance category, thanks to the No. 1 and No. 2 systems. In Asia, Japan trails China with 29 systems (down from 37).

Dr. Fu Haohuan, deputy director of NSCC-Wuxi, has written an introduction to the TaihuLight system in the journal Science China Information Sciences. In his essay, he describes how the Sunway TaihuLight provides computational support to research universities and institutes in China, such as Tsinghua University, Beijing Normal University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the First Institute of Oceanography.


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Source: Science China Press; Top500.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

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