China's new supercomputer leaves the US farther behind. (Photo : Getty Images)
China is now home to this year’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer in the world, granting it the bragging rights to becoming equal to, or better than, the United States in such feat.
In its 47th edition, the TOP500 dubbed the Chinese-made Sunway TaihuLight as the no. 1 system in the world, per an announcement from the award-giving body on Monday, June 20.
According to the New York Times, this feat, which is the seventh for consecutive years, made China a worthy contender for the U.S. in terms of technological advances.
The Fastest Supercomputer in the World
According to the commending body, the Sunway TaihuLight boasts 93 petaflop per second or quadrillions of calculations per second on the LINPACK benchmark speed.
Currently, the supercomputer is installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China, and is pegged to be two times faster and three times more efficient than the previous holder of the title, the 33.85-petaflop Tianhe-2.
According to a paper about the machine written by Jack Dongarra, the Sunway TaihuLight is mainly used for weather forecasting, advanced manufacturing, and big data analytics.
China's Pride
While this is not the first time that China received such honors, this is the first time that the Asian giant was able to overtake the U.S. in the number of entries in the TOP500 List.
"Considering that just 10 years ago, China claimed a mere 28 systems on the list, with none ranked in the top 30, the nation has come further and faster than any other country in the history of supercomputing," the TOP500 news release stated.
What is more remarkable about the feat is that it is mostly made with chips and materials made in China, with over 10.5 million processing cores and 40,960 nodes, and running on a Linux-based operating system.
In the previous years, China's entries to the list had mostly Western-made chips and processors. This year, it runs on the 260-core ShenWei 26010, which is made in the country.
Supercomputers are known to have many uses in this modern age, making them appear somewhat indispensible especially to the growing manufacturing industries and security in China.
"Today even consumer detergent bottles are designed with supercomputers," University of Chicago provost and physicist Eric D. Isaacs told the NY Times. "The Chinese are getting good at building these computers, and it's a competitive issue now for U.S. industry and national security."
