China has built the fastest supercomputer

China is worldwide leader in supercomputing. The previous fastest supercomputer in the world Tianhe-2 was already in China and the new leader is again located in this country. It is called Sunway TaihuLight and it is twice as fast as Tianhe-2. It is also three times more efficient and uses Chinese computing cores. There are 10,649,600 computing cores that are capable to achieve 93 PFLOPS, that is 93,000 trillion floating-point operations per second. These cores are divided into 40,960 nodes and they are running Linux operating system.

 

 

For the first time, China has higher number of supercomputers in Top500 than USA. Now, China has 167 of them, whereas USA has 165 only. On the other hand, USA has four supercomputers in Top10 whereas China has only two of them (but they occupy the first and the second place).

 

The consumption of the new supercomputer is enormous because of such number of computing cores, it achieves 15.37 MW at top speed. Nevertheless, even though the consumption of the whole supercomputer is high, it is because of the high number of computing cores and one core needs 1.44 W only. The new supercomputer is located in National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi in Jiangsu province.

 

Source: gizmag.com, bbc.com