China gives the US one more reason to be wary of it. The country just developed the world’s fastest supercomputer. The most surprising aspect of this high-end computational machine is that it did not employ the foreign processors to design the device.
Top500 declared Sunway TaihuLight to be the world’s fastest supercomputer. Sunway TaihuLight is a 40,960-node system powered by the 260-core ShenWei 26010. The machine flaunts a processing power of 93 petaflops, almost thrice the computational power of Tianhe-2, which featured the processing power of 33.85-petaflop.
A custom interconnects format is used by Sunway TaihuLight to connect its nodes. A custom Linux OS has been used as the software foundation for the supercomputer. The design of Sunway TaihuLight is power-efficient, consuming a mere 15.3 megawatts of energy.
The irony of this incredible Chinese design is that the US embargo imposed in 2015 may have improved the Sunway TaihuLight’s chances to become the fastest supercomputer in the world. It was expected that the Tianhe-2 will be upgraded to Intel’s Xeon Phi processors and achieve the processing power of nearly 100 petaflops. The restriction on trade activity kept those plans in check.
Sunway TaihuLight will help to find the solution for many engineering and science problems that have baffled the researchers. Good going China!
