China’s new Sunway-TaihuLight emerges world’s fastest computer at International Supercomputing Conference

China's new supercomputing system Sunway-TaihuLight was today named the world's fastest computer at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany.

According to Xinhua news agency, the National Supercomputing Centre was also unveiled simultaneously in China's Jiangsu province, where the new-generation supercomputer is installed.

The Sunway-TaihuLight has a processing capacity of 125.436 petaflops (PFlops) per second, which makes it capable of performing quadrillions of calculations per second at peak performance, and is the first supercomputer to achieve speeds in excess of 100 PFlops.

The computing power of the Sunway-TaihuLight is provided by a China-developed many-core CPU chip, which is only 25 square cm.

"It would take 7.2 billion people using electronic calculators 32 years, or two million desktop computers working together for one minute, to do the same calculation the computer can solve in just 60 seconds," said Yang Guangwen, head of the centre, Xinhua reported.

The Sunway-TaihuLight which packs 40,960 processors is installed inside the centre's 1,000-square-metre computer room.

Its speed apart, the Sunway-TaihuLight is also more energy-efficient than its predecessor Tianhe-2, which was the world's best supercomputer for six years.

One watt of electricity could drive 6 billion calculations by Sunway-TaihuLight, which was only a third of the energy consumption by the China-developed Tianhe-2, which registered 33.86 PFlops per second, for the same calculations.

According to commentators, supercomputing was not just an academic or government endeavor, but as was also an intensely nationalistic one in view of the staggering sums required  to create the components of the massive machines, write software for them, and keep them running until a new approach came along.