All international locations worldwide appear to brag about their supercomputers — properly, not all. China has introduced that they’ve a brand new supercomputer named Tianhe Xingyi. In fact, they don’t say what sort of CPU it’s utilizing, but it surely has been hinted and a few have theorized that it might have breached exascale computing. Per Wikipedia, exascale computing is the computing system able to calculating at the least “1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS).”
Customary benchmarking competitions are set to show engineering feats of this sort, however China hasn’t ever entered its stats wherever the place they are often examined. The Chinese language supercomputer program is completely secret as a result of, as you understand, China doesn’t have entry to superior expertise. Sanctions have remained levied in opposition to it, so a supercomputer that would break the exascale barrier would seemingly be unattainable.
China has been forward of the supercomputing race for a while, so the Tianhe Xingyi shouldn’t be a shock
Nonetheless, the state information company Xinhua, reported the supercomputer Tianhe Xingyi and the system have been launched in Guangzhou at this yr’s Supercomputing Innovation Utility Convention. Reuters stated that “Tianhe-2 topped an inventory of the world’s 500 quickest programs for 3 consecutive years from 2013 however dropped out of the highest place in 2016, the yr after the U.S. authorities positioned the NUDT on a blacklist that eradicated the college’s entry to the Intel processors it makes use of in its supercomputers.”
The Sunway TaihuLight, one other laptop from China developed by the Nationwide Supercomputing Middle in Wuxi, ranked seventh on the June 2023 listing — whereas the Tianhe-2 ranked tenth. Sunway TaihuLight has 93 petaflops, making it quicker than the Tianhe-2. The Sunway TaihuLight was domestically developed with a ShenWei processor, and customized interconnect as a substitute of elements which have been sourced elsewhere.
Lu Yutong, director of the Nationwide Supercomputing Middle in Guangzhou, mentioned that this new laptop, the Tianhe Xingyi, used domestically designed structure and outperformed Tianhe-2, which was developed by the Nationwide College of Protection Expertise however hosted on the Nationwide Supercomputing Middle.
Featured Picture Credit score: Google DeepMind, Pexels
