The Chinese Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer is the fastest in the world for the seventh consecutive year.
Ο Sunway TaihuLight uses processors only made in China, a fact that foreshadows the decline of American dominance in the hardware sector. The supercomputer is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China, and was developed by the Chinese National Research Center for Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology.
It uses Chinese Shenwei processors and performs 93 petaflops, or quadruplets millions calculations per second, according to TOP500. It was designed for use in engineering and research, focusing on: climate, weather, life sciences, advanced manufacturing and data analysis.
Sunway TaihuLight has a total of 10.649.600 CPU cores across the system. TaihuLight runs Sunway Raise OS 2.0.5 which is based on Linux. Electric consumption is around 15 MW.
China this year except του ότι κατέχει την Νο 1 θέση ξεπερνώντας τις ΗΠΑ, εμφανίζεται για πρώτη φορά ως η χώρα με τους περισσότερους supercomputers in the TOR-500. China had 167 supersystems and the US had 165. Japan came in third with 29 systems. Other countries that previously had computers in the Top 10 were Japan, Switzerland, Germany and Saudi Arabia.
Η ανάπτυξη των υπερυπολογιστικών συστημάτων που πραγματοποιεί η Κίνα κάνει τεράστια άλματα, αφού πριν από δέκα χρόνια, η Κίνα είχε μόλις 28 συστήματα που περιλαμβάνονται στον κατάλογο ΤΟΡ-500, χωρίς κανένα από αυτά να βρίσκεται στο top 30.
