China Beats U.S., Builds World's Fastest Supercomputer Without Using US Chips
Without Using U.S. Chips, China Builds The World's Fastest Supercomputers
China made a bold movie by unveiling the world's fastest supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight. It is a gigantic system with 10.65 million compute cores. Its peak performance is said to be at 124.5 petaflops. A petaflop is equivalent to a thousand trillion(one quadrillion) sustained flotaing-points per second.
Since the inception of the TOP500, this year's list marked the first time that the U.S. is no longer leading the largest number of systems in the world. Based on their detailed report, China leads the competition by having 167 systems compared to the U.S with 165.
Winning the Competition
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China was also the home of last year's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-2, which has a peak performance of 54.9 petaflops and uses the Intel Xeon processors. In comparison, the Sunway TaihuLight is twice as fast and three times as efficient as Tianhe-2. This clearly demonstrates China's dominance over supercomputer systems.
Standing Their Ground
In the past 10 years, China only managed to produce 10 systems which was included in the TOP500. But today, with 167 systems on their list, the Southeast Asian giant showed the world that it can be independent from U.S when it comes to technology.
Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee and one of the academic leaders of the TOP500 supercomputing list said, "TaihuLight is running 'sizeable applications,' which include advanced manufacturing, earth systems modeling, life science and big data applications. This shows that the system is capable of running real applications and [is] not just a stunt machine."
Driven to Become Independent
Japan and Russia are also making their own progress in computer development. It was also reported that Europe has been building supercomputers from ARM processors, and just like China, has been putting efforts to decrese dependency on U.S.-made chips and processors.
Over a year ago, the U.S goverment banned Intel from supplying their Xenon chips to China's top supercomputing facilities. Whether the chip ban accelerated China's resolve to create their own microprocessors technology is still debatable, but it's definitely clear that its reliance over U.S is slowly deminishing.
Steve Conway, a high performance computing analyst at IDC said, "The Chinese were already determined over time to move to an indigenous processor. I think the ban accelerates that -- it increases that determination."
