China reveals record-breaking supercomputer is world's fastest

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

A Chinese supercomputer has topped a list of the world's fastest computers for the seventh straight year — and for the first time the winner uses only Chinese-designed processors instead of U.S. technology.

The Sunway TaihuLight can run quadrillions of calculations per second, and is the first system to exceed more than 100 petaflops at peak performance.

The Sunway TaihuLight achieves 93 Pflops on the Linpack benchmark, and has a peak performance of 125 Pflops.

The Sunway TaihuLight uses a total of 40,960 Chinese-designed SW26010 manycore 64-bit RISC processors based on the ShenWei architecture. Each processor chip contains 256 general-purpose processing cores, and an additional 4 auxiliary cores for system management, for a total of 10,649,600 CPU cores across the entire system.

The cores feature 64 kB of scratchpad memory for data (and 12 kB for instructions) and communicate via a network on a chip, instead of having a traditional cache hierarchy, similar to architectures such as the Cell microprocessor and Adapteva Epiphany.

Systems of this kind are used for weather forecasting, designing nuclear weapons, analyzing oilfields and other specialized purposes.

The supercomputer may be used to conduct earth system modelling, ocean surface wave modelling, atomistic simulation, and phase-field simulation.

 

[R-T-B]

China learned to multithread their CPUs enmasse. Cool. Now if only they could fix some bit of their country in the area of human rights... maybe their supercomputer can tell them how.

Sarcastic comments aside, I actually have some knowledge of these CPUs, as I did some development for a very early version as part of a code bounty that earned me a nice little "Fuloong" mini pc. The CPU that shipped with those was a version of the Loongson (It meant "Dragon chip", essentially) I in all it's 800Mhz single core glory. If they kept with what was popular then with their devs, these are using the MIPS64 instruction set.

But obviously China has come a long way since then... which is scary considering that was only 2012.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I think USA has fallen behind because focus has shifted from supercomputers to quantum computers, artificial intelligences, and machine learning. USA is looking to deploy scalpels instead of hammers: smaller machines that do the same task smarter and faster; brute forcing was so a decade ago.

 

[cdawall]

So what's curious is the giant contract they signed to use/license amd?

 

[Ahhzz]

It's amazing that thing can run that fast with having to duplicate all it's output to the storage server in the Government headquarters....

 

[FordGT90Concept]

So what's curious is the giant contract they signed to use/license amd?

Because RISC is rather inflexible. They need x86 to do more complex supercomputing.

 

[jsfitz54]

It's amazing that thing can run that fast with having to duplicate all it's output to the storage server in the Government headquarters....

Straight to the "Whispering Wall".

EDIT: Dam, that's one fast Abacus.

 

[newconroer]

Well it's some consolation that for all those years of being the leader, they were using American technology/products. It's softens the harsh reality that everything in the world is made by China and we import it.