At the 2016 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) held in June in Frankfurt, Germany, China’s new supercomputer, Sunway-Taihu Light, topped the conference’s Top 500 list for speed, making 100,000 trillion calculations per second, almost three times faster than the ISC’s second-fastest computer, China’s Tianhe-II.
This marked the seventh time that a Chinese-built computer was ranked the world’s fastest. Yang Guangwen, director of the China Supercomputer Center Wuxi Branch, where Sunway-Taihu Light is located, told Xinhua News Agency that the computer’s processing power per minute is equal to 7.2 billion people – the world’s total population – each using a regular desktop computer to make round-the-clock calculations for 32 years.
Chinese media have indicated that nearly 1.8 billion yuan (US$280m) of government funding was invested in the new supercomputer, the core components of which are all domestically made. Tsinghua University now has responsibility for its operation and maintenance.
According to ISC’s 2016 Top 500 List, China has overtaken the US to become the country with the highest number of supercomputers within its borders, at 167.
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