China's Sunway BlueLight MPP Supercomputer Skyrockets On Most Powerful List
Business, and technology, is booming in China. No shock there. As the world soars past 7 billion people, the home to many of them is soaring to new heights in the supercomputer arena. China has just completed their first supercomputer based on Chinese-made microprocessors, with the announcement coming this week at a tech meeting held in Jinan.
The new machine is called the Sunway BlueLight MPP, and it was officially installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan. A New York Times report mentions that it can perform around 1,000 trillion calculations per second, putting it among the 20 fastest supercomputers in the world. To do all of that math, it's relying on 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors, designed and engineered at a Chinese computer institute and produced in Shanghai.
China hasn't exactly hung with the world's elite in supercomputer speed, making the advent of this thing all the more outstanding. In theory, this guy's peak performance is around 74% as fast as the fastest supercomputer in the U.S. (the Cray-built Jaguar supercomputer at the Department of Energy facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory), which current ranks 3rd in the world.
There's no telling if this is just the start for China, but we're guessing that being in the Top 20 just isn't enough. Expect to see even more supercomputer feats from Asia in short order.
The new machine is called the Sunway BlueLight MPP, and it was officially installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan. A New York Times report mentions that it can perform around 1,000 trillion calculations per second, putting it among the 20 fastest supercomputers in the world. To do all of that math, it's relying on 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors, designed and engineered at a Chinese computer institute and produced in Shanghai.
China hasn't exactly hung with the world's elite in supercomputer speed, making the advent of this thing all the more outstanding. In theory, this guy's peak performance is around 74% as fast as the fastest supercomputer in the U.S. (the Cray-built Jaguar supercomputer at the Department of Energy facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory), which current ranks 3rd in the world.
There's no telling if this is just the start for China, but we're guessing that being in the Top 20 just isn't enough. Expect to see even more supercomputer feats from Asia in short order.
