China Develops New World's Fastest Supercomputer

Chinese engineers just set a new world record in computing.

[Image Courtesy of ExtremeTech/TOP500]

The Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer triples the speed of the previous fastest computer. The engineers used their own chip technology to craft the TaihuLight.

“As the first number one system of China that is completely based on homegrown processors, the Sunway TaihuLight system demonstrates the significant progress that China has made in the domain of designing and manufacturing large-scale computation systems,” Center director Dr. Guangwen Yang said in an interview with TOP500 News.

The TaihuLight boasts 41,000 chips and 26 processor cores. In total, that's nearly 10.7 million cores.

The previous record holder, Tianhe-2, also came from Chinese engineers. China held the top spot for supercomputers for the last three years. Tianhe-2, aka Milky Way-2, sits at the National University of Defense Technology. It performs 33.8 quadrillion calculations in a second.

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The next non-Chinese computer ranks third as a computer from the U.S. The TaihuLight is about five times faster and more powerful than the U.S.'s best.

[Image Courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory]

However, last year, President Barack Obama announced an initiative for US engineers to craft a computer 20 times faster than the Tianhe-2. No word yet as to how the TaihuLight will affect that initiative.

For more information about the history of supercomputers, check out the video below from Techquickie.

Via Futurism