China built a supercomputer using domestic chip technology, declared to be the world's fastest.
The Sunway TaihuLight becomes the fastest as it takes the record from Tianhe-2 which is also located in China, with triple its speed.
The TaihuLight is comprised of some 41,000 chips, each with 260 processor cores. This makes for a total of 10.65 million cores. With 1.3 petabytes of memory used for the entire machine, the system is energy efficient, drawing just 15.3 megawatts of power (less than the 17.8 megawatts used by the 33-petaflop Tianhe-2).
With this setup, TaihuLight has the ability to perform as some 93 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflops), and about five times more powerful than the fastest U.S. supercomputer, which is ranked the third worldwide.
"It’s not based on an existing architecture. They built it themselves," said Jack Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee and creator of the measurement system used to rank the world's supercomputers.
"This is a system that has Chinese processors."
Supercomputers created by China or the U.S., have been integral for national security and scientific researches. From calculating sophisticated equations, to tasks like climate forecasting and product design. Supercomputers are also useful in research for cybersecurity and nuclear weaponry.
According to its creators, the TaihuLight is aimed in the fields of manufacturing, life science, and Earth system modeling.
The development of TaihuLight was funded under the "863 program," which is a government project for ending China's reliance on foreign technology.
2 years later, the Sunway TaihuLight has been surpassed by the 200 petaflops Summit supercomputer created by the U.S.