Since 2017, China stopped taking part in the LINPACK benchmark used by the TOP500 organization to rank the world’s most power supercomputers. Yet for the past several years, the Chinese Society of Computer Science has released a listing of the country’s top 100 supercomputers. Yet China’s HPC opacity remains, with omissions of powerful systems that the country is widely believed to have in operation.
It’s known that China has several exascale-class systems, yet none of them appears on the new top 100 list. The consensus theory regarding the PRC’s reticence is that to reveal the country’s actual supercomputing resources could excite from the West more technology trade sanctions, on top of the ones already in place.
So much about China’s top 100 list is opaque, including – from a western perspective – that it’s mostly in Chinese. However, we relied on Google Translate for help, and under the “Model” (” 型号”) category ,the top-ranked system is referred to as “Supercomputing center host system, heterogeneous many-core processor” (“超算中心主机系统,异构众核处理器”), with 160,000 CPUs and a peak (“峰值”) LINPACK score of 620 petaflops.
This would rank the system fifth on the current TOP500 list.
This system also topped last year’s top 100 list.
There are only two new entries on the list, an Intel-powered system with peak LINPACK of 7.9 petaflops ranked no. 13, and at no. 57 and located at the Beijing Super Cloud Computing Center A8 Zone a system with peak LINPACK of 3.2 petaflops.
China is widely believed to have had since 2021 an exascale supercomputer, the first system to reach the milestone, and is thought to have at least three in operation today with several more in development.
The U.S. entered the exascale race in June 2022, with the HPE-Cray /AMD-powered Frontier system housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
