China Makes World’s Fastest Supercomputer With 10 Million Cores And 93 Petaflops Speed

The top 500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers was introduced 23 years ago. For the first time in history, China has toppled the US to become the country with the most entries on the list. Now, China has 167 machines on the list, compared to the U.S.’s 165.

The new Chinese supercomputer has beaten another Chinese machine that ruled this list for the past three years. Called TaihuLight, this supercomputer is about three times more powerful than the previous record-holder. Compared to the fastest U.S. supercomputer Cray XK7, that ranks 3rd, TaihuLight is five times faster.

The latest supercomputer rankings were released today at International Supercomputer Conference in Frankfurt.

Another important thing about TaihuLight is the use of homegrown Chinese chips. After the U.S. banned the export of Intel chips last year, China decided to use its superconductor technology.

The Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer was developed at the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (NRCPC). TaihuLight features the Made In China SW26010 processors that are said to be similar to the Digital Alpha chip.

TaihuLight has more than 40,000 chips with 10.65 million processor cores stacked in 40 cabinets. Compared to this, the fastest supercomputer of the U.S. has just 560,000 cores.

This beast showed a capacity of 93 petaflops per second on benchmark tests, which is about three times faster than past record-holder Tianhe-2.

If you think that the U.S. is simply sitting and watching these developments, read the next sentence. The American government has already granted a $200 million contract to Intel and NVIDIA to build a 150 petaflop machine.