China’s new supercomputer performs 93,000 trillion calculations per second

China has done it again, this time with a new supercomputer. Dubbed the Sunway TaihuLight, the intelligent machine is now the fastest system in the world, taking the first slot on the Top500 list of supercomputers.

Unlike the previous and now second-best supercomputer on the list, the Tianhe-2, which is also Chinese but uses chips from Intel, the TaihuLight uses all Chinese architecture and hits impressive benchmarks while doing so. Long story short, it can perform 93,000 trillion calculations per second.

China's TaihuLight supercomputer. Image source: Top500.

As a basis for comparison, Intel’s new 10-core processor for home-computing sounds rather small next to the TaihuLight’s 10.65 million cores, which is much higher than the 560,000 cores of the U.S.’s top supercomputer, Titan, a Cray XK7 system. Currently Titan is ranked third in the Top500.

Equipped with 10.65 million cores, the new largest supercomputer in the world hits 93 petaflops, or 93 quadrillion calculations per second. With that kind of power, TaihuLight alone compromises 16.4% of the total computing performance on the list, against all 499 other entrants. As if that’s not striking enough, China’s top supercomputer is surprisingly energy-efficient. A lot of power is expended on RAM, and the TaihuLight uses a smaller amount of RAM than less powerful computers. 

The ShenWei 26010 processor. Image source: The New York Times.

So what’s under the hood of the new victor? It packs a locally developed ShenWei processor and custom interconnect, instead of parts sourced elsewhere. The ShenWei 26010 is a 260-core, 64-bit RISC chip that exceeds three teraflops at maximum tilt, putting it on par with Intel’s Knight’s Landing Xeo Phi. The computer contains 40,960 ShenWei 26010s, one for each node that also contains 32 GB of RAM.

This is the first time in history that the U.S. does not have the most supercomputers on the Top500 list. China has taken the lead with 167 entries, including the top two, while the U.S. is in second place with 165 computers. Hands down, China wins bragging rights in the world of supercomputers.

However, it’s possible that the U.S. could reclaim the throne, since Intel is expected to announce a new high-level chip at the 2016 International Supercomputer Conference this month.

 Source: The New York Times