News

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.

Gareth Andrews

Disqus Comments Loading...

Recent Posts

Electronic Arts Titles Played for Over 11 Billion Hours in 2024

Electronic Arts (EA) announced today that its games were played for over 11 billion hours…

2 days ago

Just 15% of Steam Gaming Time in 2024 Was Spent on New Releases

Steam's annual end-of-year recap, Steam Replay, provides fascinating insights into gamer habits by comparing individual…

2 days ago

STALKER 2 Gets Massive 110GB Patch With 1800+ Fixes

GSC GameWorld released a major title update for STALKER 2 this seeking, bringing the game…

2 days ago

Intel Unveils Core 200H Processors Based on the Previous Raptor Lake Refresh

Without any formal announcement, Intel appears to have revealed its new Core 200H series processors…

3 days ago

Ubisoft Reportedly Developing a New Quadruple A Game

Ubisoft is not having the best of times, but despite recent flops, the company still…

3 days ago

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl Update 1.1 Fixes 1,800 Issues and Revamps A-Life 2.0

If you haven’t started playing STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl yet, now might be the…

3 days ago