World’s fastest supercomputer entirely made in China

China has always been reliant on US microprocessors, it’s now second fastest system the Tianhe-2 uses Intel Xeon processors clocks in at 54.9 petaflops. Back in April previous year, the US State Department set up an embargo that blocked the sales of Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi processors to Chinese institutions – most notably the National University for Defence Technologies (NUDT), which is home to the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, the most powerful supercomputer in the world since 2013, with a sustained performance of 33.86 petaFLOPS. The 93 petaflop per second machine is not just notable for its ridiculous horsepower, but also for the fact that it’s a completely domestic achievement; every one of its 10.5 million processing cores and 40,960 nodes were made in China.

Today saw China unveil the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It runs the Sunway Raise OS (with a standard Linux base) and boasts more than 1.3 PB of memory.

TaihuLight uses 41,000 chips, each with 260 processor cores, to give it a grand total of 10.65 million cores.

There’s a new supercomputer in town, and it has topped every other supercomputer on the planet. Tianhe-2 had occupied the top spot on the past six TOP500 lists.

In the latest list, Titan, a system installed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is now the No. 3 system.

The features and specs of the machine not only give direct competition to USA dominance in the tech industry, especially as far as semi-conductors are concerned, but also pushes the best American-made Supercomputer to third position in the world rankings. And it’s really freaking powerful, running twice as fast as Tianhe-2. It is intended for use in engineering and research including climate, weather, life sciences, advanced manufacturing and data analytics. On the other hand, China utilized the majority of its wealth in constructing its own supercomputers named Arm and Alpha super processors. In April 2015, the USA blocked high-end processors, such as Intel’s Xeon Phi chips, being sold to a number of Chinese supercomputing centers. In addition, China now has more supercomputers on the list-167-than the United States, with 165, the first time in the more than two decades that the list has been kept that the United States is not home to the largest number of computers. China already had set its sights on building the first supercomputer that could deliver a performance of more than 100 petaflops, Top500 wrote.

The Sunway TaihuLight uses the custom-designed SW26010 processor.