Sunway TaihuLight is new China’s Supercomputer,  three times faster than China’s Tianhe-2, which was the world’s fastest supercomputer has been replaced by the Sunway TaihuLight. It is capable of performing some 93 quadrillion calculations per second (otherwise known as petaflops) and is roughly five times more powerful than the speediest US system, which is now ranked third worldwide.

Sunway TaihuLight

The TaihuLight is comprised of 41,000 processors, each having 260 cores, which in total makes a 10.65 million cores with a peak performance of 125 petaflops. In terms of memory, it’s relatively light on its feet, with just 1.3 petabytes used for the entire machine. (By comparison, the much less powerful 10-petaflop K supercomputer uses 1.4 petabytes of RAM.)

TaihuLight is currently up and running at the National Supercomputing Center in the city of Wuxi, a manufacturing and technology hub, a two-hour drive west of Shanghai. The system will be used for various research and engineering work, in areas such as climate, weather & earth systems modeling, life science research, advanced manufacturing, and data analytics. Center director Prof. Dr. Guangwen Yang, will formally introduce the system on Tuesday afternoon, in a session at ISC.

“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,” Yang told TOP-500 News.

The system runs on its own operating system, Raise OS, which is based on Linux. The system has its own customized implementation of OpenACC 2.0 to aid the parallelization of code.