The Sunway Taihulight supercomputer in Wuxi, China is currently #1 on the TOP500 list.
The Xinhua news service reports that prototype for China’s new-generation exascale supercomputer is set for launch in 2018.
The launch of the sample machine will pave the way for the development of a supercomputer capable of a billion billion calculations per second,” said Zhang Ting, a researcher with the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin.
The new supercomputer will be 200 times faster and have 100 times more storage capacity than the Tianhe-1 supercomputer, China’s first petaflop supercomputer launched in 2010, Zhang said.
The supercomputer center in Tianjin began developing the exascale supercomputer with the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in 2016. China’s national plan for the next generation of HPC machines calls for a fully operational exascale machine for deployment by 2020.
China’s ongoing efforts in HPC are evident in the recent TOP500 list, where the nation has the two fastest supercomputers in the world. In fact, China has overtaken the US in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 143.
In June 2016, China unveiled its fastest new supercomputer — the Sunway TaihuLight — with a peak performance of 124.5 petaflops, the world’s first system to exceed 100 petaflops.
Zhang said the next-generation exascale computer will not only lead in calculation speed, but also in data transmission efficiency.
