CHINA TAKING OVER THE WORLD TECHNOLOGICALLY BY UNVEILING THE WORLD’S FASTEST COMPUTERm

A supercomputer is a computer with a high-level computational capacity compared to a general-purpose computer. Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of
million instructions per second (MIPS). As of 2015, there are supercomputers which can perform up to quadrillions of FLOPS.






Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, made initially, and for decades primarily, by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), Cray Research and subsequent companies bearing his name or monogram. While the supercomputers of the 1970s used only a few processors, in the 1990s machines with thousands of processors began to appear and, by the end of the 20th century, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of “off-the-shelf” processors were the norm.

As of June 2016 the fastest supercomputer in the world is the Sunway TaihuLight, with a Linpack benchmark of 93 petaFLOPS(PFLOPS), exceeding the previous record holder, Tianhe-2, by around 59 PFLOPS.



China now 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.

The newest edition of the list was announced Monday, June 20, at the 2016 International Supercomputer Conference in Frankfurt. The closely watched list is issued twice a year.

Sunway TaihuLight, with 10,649,600 computing cores comprising 40,960 nodes, is twice as fast and three times as efficient as Tianhe-2, which posted a LINPACK performance of 33.86 petaflop/s. The peak power consumption under load (running the HPL benchmark) is at 15.37 MW, or 6 Gflops/Watt. This allows the TaihuLight system to grab one of the top spots on the Green500 in terms of the Performance/Power metric.  Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is now the No. 3 system. It achieved 17.59 petaflop/s.