China Launches A Stronger Supercomputer System

Illustration of super computers. (photo: Pixabay)

JAKARTA - On Wednesday, December 6, China announced a new domestically developed supercomputer system that is claimed to be much stronger than the previous version. The supercomputer system called "Tianhe Xingyi" was unveiled by the National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou, at an industry event in the capital city of Guangdong Province in southern China, the Xinhua news agency reported.

Xinhua does not provide more details about the computing power of this new system. However, the report cites Lu Yutong, the central director, who stated that the new computer uses a domestically designed architecture and has surpassed Tianhe-2's performance, one of China's fastest supercomputers, in terms of CPU computing power, network, storage, and applications.

Tianhe-2 is being developed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and hosted at the National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou. Tianhe-2 is at the top of the list of 500 fastest systems in the world for three consecutive years starting from 2013.

But the computer came out of the top position in 2016, after the US government put NUDT on a blacklist that lost access to the university to an Intel processor used in its supercomputer.

Another well-known Chinese supercomputer system including Sunway TaihuLight, developed by the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, which ranks seventh on the June 2023 list, while Tianhe-2 ranks tenth.