China wins Supercomputer crown for eighth time

China has topped in the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers for the eight consecutive years for its ‘Sunway TaihuLight’.

Sunway TaihuLight

‘Sunway TaihuLight’ is a massive supercomputer, built entirely using processors designed and made in China.

• TaihuLight is capable to perform 93 million billion calculations per second(petaflop/s).
• TaihuLight was launched in June 2017, replacing the former champion, Tianhe-2, which is also a Chinese system but built based on Intel chips.
• TaihuLight is almost three times as fast as Tianhe-2, which had claimed No 1 spot in the Top500 list for the past three years.

The Top 500 list is considered one of the most authoritative rankings of the world’s supercomputers.

Chinese supercomputer has topped the rankings for successive eight times, which indicates the rise of China in the high performance computing (HPC) field.

• The 48th edition of the Top500 list released in June indicated that China and the US are neck-and-neck in performance with each other for supercomputing supremacy.
• According to the list, China overtook the US in the number of total supercomputers installed. This time, the number of systems installed in China increased to 171 from 168 on the list.
• It was the first time that the US could not top the category since the list was started 23 years ago.
• US hold 33.9 per cent of the overall installed supercomputers while China is second with 33.3 per cent of the overall installed performance.

The list also includes:

• Titan and Sequoia, both systems from the US, gained No 3 and No 4 positions respectively.
• The Cori supercomputer, a new system installed at the US Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, slipped at No 5 position with a performance of 14.0 petaflop/s.

In case of companies that makes these systems

• The America-based Hewlett-Packard Enterprise topped the list with 112 supercomputer.
• China’s Lenovo was at No 2 position with 92 systems.
• Chinese vendor Sugon was at No 4 position with 47 systems
• China’s Inspur at No 8 with 18 systems and
• Huawei, again a Chinese vendor, at No 9 with 16 systems.