Performing 93 quadrillion calculations per second, a new Chinese supercomputer called Sunway TaihuLight dethroned China's Tianhe-2 from the top in a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world released on Monday. "China maintained its No. 1 ranking on the 47th edition of the TOP 500 list of the world's top supercomputers," said a statement from the semiannual list compiled by U.S. and European experts, "but with a new system built entirely using processors designed and made in China." Sunway TaihuLight, with 10,649,600 computing cores comprising 40,960 nodes, is about twice as fast and three times as efficient as Tianhe-2, which has a performance of 33.86 quadrillion calculations per second, or petaflop per second. The new system was developed by the Chinese National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi of Jiangsu, an eastern coastal province of China. Previously, Tianhe-2, an Intel-based Chinese supercomputer, has claimed the No. 1 spot in the past six TOP 500 lists. "Sunway also leads in the power consumption across the world, which means it excels in the computing speed per unit watt, raising the efficiency nearly three times as compared with that of Tianhe-2 supercomputer. Tianhe'-2 performs 2 billion calculations per watt while Sunway is 5.7 billion calculations per watt," said Qian Depei, director of a China's high performance computing project. China has planned for the development of supercomputers, according to Fu Haohuan, deputy director of National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. "China has made a plan to strive to realize E-level [computing speed] by 2020 and E-level speed means a breakthrough of 10 times from 100 quadrillion [calculations per second] to 1 quintillion [calculations per second]. The integration level and energy efficiency of the chips in our supercomputers may need to improve further," said Fu. The latest list also marked the first time since the inception of the TOP 500 list in 1993 that the United States is not home to the largest number of supercomputer systems. "With a surge in industrial and research installations registered over the last few years, China leads with 167 systems and the U.S. is second with 165," the statement said. China also leads the performance category, thanks to the No. 1 and No. 2 systems, it said. Other systems rounding out the Top 10 are U.S. Sequoia, Japan's Fujitsu's K, U.S. Mira and Trinity, Switzerland's Piz Daint, Germany's Hazel Hen, as well as Shaheen II of Saudi Arabia. The TOP 500 list is considered one of the most authoritative rankings of the world's supercomputers. It is compiled on the basis of the machines' performance on the Linpack benchmark by U.S. and German experts. More on: http://www.cctvplus.com/news/20160620/8024626.shtml#!language=1 Subscribe us on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CCTVPlus CCTV+ official website: http://www.cctvplus.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cctv-news-content? Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewsContent.CCTVPLUS Twitter: https://twitter.com/NewsContentPLUS

• published: 20 Jun 2016
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