The Sunway TaihuLight ( ''Shénwēi·tàihú zhī guāng'') is a Chinese

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

which, , is ranked 11th in the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list, with a

LINPACK benchmark The LINPACK benchmarks are a measure of a system's floating-point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense ''n'' × ''n'' system of linear equations ''Ax'' = ''b'', which i ...

rating of 93

petaflops Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...

. The name is translated as ''divine power, the light of Taihu Lake''. This is nearly three times as fast as the previous

Tianhe-2 Tianhe-2 or TH-2 (, i.e. 'Milky Way 2') is a 33.86- petaflop supercomputer located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers. It was the world's fastest supercomputer ...

, which ran at 34 petaflops. , it is ranked as the 16th most energy-efficient supercomputer in the

Green500 The Green500 is a biannual ranking of supercomputers, from the TOP500 list of supercomputers, in terms of energy efficiency. The list measures performance per watt using the TOP500 measure of high performance LINPACK benchmarks at double-preci ...

, with an efficiency of 6.1 GFlops/watt. It was designed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and is located at the

National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi Since the early 2000s, China has increased its presence in the TOP500 rankings of Supercomputer, supercomputers, with systems like Tianhe-1A reaching the top position in 2010 and Sunway TaihuLight leading in 2016. By 2018, China had the highest ...

in the city of

Wuxi Wuxi ( zh, s=无锡, p=Wúxī, ) is a city in southern Jiangsu, China. As of the 2024 census, it had a population of 7,495,000. The city lies in the southern Yangtze delta and borders Lake Tai. Notable landmarks include Lihu Park, the Mt. Lings ...

, in

Jiangsu Jiangsu is a coastal Provinces of the People's Republic of China, province in East China. It is one of the leading provinces in finance, education, technology, and tourism, with its capital in Nanjing. Jiangsu is the List of Chinese administra ...

province, China. The Sunway TaihuLight was the world's fastest supercomputer for two years, from June 2016 to June 2018, according to the TOP500 lists. The record was surpassed in June 2018 by IBM's

Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used only for ...

Architecture

The Sunway TaihuLight utilizes domestically developed semiconductors, including a total of 40,960 Chinese-designed SW26010 manycore 64-bit RISC processors based on the Sunway architecture. Each processor chip contains 256 processing cores, and an additional four auxiliary cores for system management (also RISC cores, just more fully featured) for a total of 10,649,600 CPU cores across the entire system. The processing cores feature 64 KB of scratchpad memory for data (and 16 KB for instructions) and communicate via a

network on a chip A network on a chip or network-on-chip (NoC or )This article uses the convention that "NoC" is pronounced . Therefore, it uses the convention "a" for the indefinite article corresponding to NoC ("a NoC"). Other sources may pronounce it as an ...

, instead of having a traditional

cache hierarchy Cache hierarchy, or multi-level cache, is a memory architecture that uses a hierarchy of memory stores based on varying access speeds to cache data. Highly requested data is cached in high-speed access memory stores, allowing swifter access by cent ...

Software

The system runs on its own operating system, Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5, which is based on

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

. The system has its own customized implementation of OpenACC 2.0 to aid the parallelization of code.

Future development

China's first exascale supercomputer was scheduled to enter service by 2020 according to the head of the school of computing at the

National University of Defense Technology The National University of Defense Technology (NUDT; ) is a national public research university headquartered in Kaifu, Changsha, Hunan, China. It is affiliated with the Central Military Commission. The university is part of Project 211, ...

(NUDT). According to the national plan for the next generation of high performance computers, the country would have develop an exascale computer during the 13th Five-Year-Plan period (2016–2020). The government of Tianjin Binhai New Area, NUDT and the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin are working on the project. The investment is likely to hit 3 billion yuan ($470.6 million).

References

External links

Top500 list entry for the Sunway TaihuLight

CCTV video news story on Sunway TaihuLight

Hardware of Sunway TaihuLight
* - BBC 5-minute video {{coord, 31, 32, 55.01, N, 120, 14, 52.94, E, region:CN_type:landmark, display=title 2016 in technology Petascale computers Supercomputers Supercomputing in China 64-bit computers

Architecture

Software

Future development

See also

References

External links