China wins supercomputer crown for eighth time

TIL Desk/World/Beijing-For the eight consecutive year, China has retained the top spot in the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers for its ‘Sunway TaihuLight’ which can perform 93 million billion calculations per second.

TaihuLight, the massive supercomputer, built entirely using processors designed and made in China has been crowned as the world’s fastest, state-run news agency quoted the latest edition of the semiannual Top500 list of supercomputers released on Monday.

TaihuLight made its appearance in June, replacing the former champion, Tianhe-2, also a Chinese system but built based on Intel chips. TaihuLight is capable of performing 93 million billion calculations per second (petaflop/s).

That is almost three times as fast as Tianhe-2, which had claimed No 1 spot in the Top 500 list for the past three years. That means a Chinese supercomputer has topped the rankings for eight times in a row, indicating the rise of China in the high performance computing (HPC) field, the report said.

 In the previous list released in June, China overtook the US in the number of total supercomputers installed. That was the first time that the US has not dominated this category since the list was started 23 years ago.