Earlier this week at the International Supercomputer Conference in Germany, a Chinese-built supercomputer was hailed as the fastest computer in the world.
The Sunway TaihuLight, the world’s fastest computer, is being managed by the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi City. It can perform three times faster than other supercomputers. At its maximum load, it can do 93,000 trillion calculations every second. Powering up its capabilities is ShenWei, a brand new China-made chip. ShenWei can hit 3 teraflops, which is as good as Intel’s leading chips.
The National Supercomputing Center plans to use the supercomputer for various research projects and studies. It will support the development of studies related to climate, biology, and data analytics. Professor Dr. Guangwen Yang, Director of National Supercomputing Center, stated that Sunway TaihuLight reflects the important process that China did in terms of designing and creating large scale computation system.
Some reports stated that America needs two more years to build a supercomputer as powerful as Sunway TaihuLight’s system. This was the first time that China has created a supercomputer using fully local components, making Sunway TaihuLight’s success very meaningful to the country.
