The Sunway TaihuLight (神威·太湖之光) has been installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi. The computer is very powerful. In tests it is capable of performing some 93,000 trillion calculations per second. This makes the “super-computer” twice as fast and three times as efficient as any previous computer. The previous record holder also hailed from China — the Tianhe-2.
The TaihuLight has 10.5 million processing cores and 40,960 nodes. It runs on a Linux-based operating system called Raise OS. The Linux operating system is the software on a computer that enables applications and the computer operator to access the devices on the computer to perform desired functions.
The new super-computer gives China dominance of the global list of the 500 most powerful computers operating in the world today. China has 167 computers in the top 500 while the U.S. has 165 devices.
What can such a powerful machine be used for? The primary use will be with advanced manufacturing, weather forecasting and big data analytics. However, in practice, this may not lead to anything too remarkable in the short-term. Interviewed by the BBC, Professor Les Carr from the University of Southampton, U.K., said: “As a computer scientist it’s difficult writing software that can take advantage of and control large numbers of computer cores.”
Furthermore, not everyone is impressed. HPC Guru (@HPC_Guru) tweeted: “To me, the most impressive thing about Taihulight is the cost. $270 million.”
