It isn’t too much of a surprise to find out that China has developed a new supercomputer that is deemed to be the fastest in the world. This new supercomputer, called the Sunway TaihuLight, succeeds the Tianhe-2, a supercomputer that is also located in China. However, what differentiates the TaihuLight and the Tianhe-2 is that the TaihuLight is the first supercomputer to be fully powered by Chinese processors.
Developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC), the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer is powered by the ShenWei 26010 processor, a 260-core processor that can produce just over 3 teraflops of computing power. One of these chips can be found in each of the TaihuLight’s 40,960 nodes, giving the supercomputer around 93 petaflops of computing power, which is three time more powerful than the 33.85-petaflop Tianhe-2. Raw horsepower isn’t the only sector that the TaihuLight is beating the Tianhe-2 as the former machine runs at a relatively modest 15.3 megawatts of energy consumption.
The development of the TaihuLight also has its share of irony. According to TOP500, the 2015 US embargo of high-end processors means that the Tianhe-2 was unable to upgrade to Intel’s Xeon Phi processors. It also caused China to step up its processor development, leading to the development of the ShenWei 26010.