The Sunway TaihuLight is a Monolithic Supercomputer

When it comes to supercomputers, everyone is looking for the next best thing. From building multi-core processors to creating the first quantum computer, everyone is looking at building the greatest computer and China’s latest attempt at a supercomputer comes completely from the country, no US parts included.

The non-US system is titled the Sunway TaihuLight and has a theoretical peak performance of 124.5 petaflops. While this may not seem like much in the size of numbers you can think of a petaflop as one quadrillion floating point operations a second, a number that seems to grow bigger every time you consider it. To put it open for comparison, the next fastest computer was China’s Tianhe-2 which had just over half of the TaihuLight’s performance at just 54.9 petaflops.

Described by Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee, stated that the creators have proven that the TaihuLight is more than “just a stunt machine” by running “sizeable applications” from the real world such as big data and advanced manufacturing software.

The reason for the China only part was courtesy of the US banning Intel from supplying China with their Xeon chips, forcing the supercomputing research centers to look at alternatives closer to home.