The Sunway TaihuLight ( ''Shénwēi·tàihú zhī guāng'') is a Chinese

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

which, , is ranked fourth in the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list, with a

LINPACK benchmark The LINPACK Benchmarks are a measure of a system's Floating-point arithmetic, floating-point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense ''n'' by ''n'' system of linear equations ''Ax'' =&nbs ...

rating of 93

petaflops In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

. The name is translated as ''divine power, the light of Taihu Lake''. This is nearly three times as fast as the previous

Tianhe-2 Tianhe-2 or TH-2 (, i.e. 'Milky Way 2') is a 33.86-petaflops supercomputer located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers. It was the world's fastest supercomputer ac ...

, which ran at 34 petaflops. , it is ranked as the 16th most energy-efficient supercomputer in the

Green500 The Green500 is a biannual ranking of supercomputers, from the TOP500 list of supercomputers, in terms of energy efficiency. The list measures performance per watt using the TOP500 measure of high performance LINPACK benchmarks at double-precisi ...

, with an efficiency of 6.051 GFlops/watt. It was designed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi in the city of

Wuxi Wuxi (, ) is a city in southern Jiangsu province, eastern China, by car to the northwest of downtown Shanghai, between Changzhou and Suzhou. In 2017 it had a population of 3,542,319, with 6,553,000 living in the entire prefecture-level city ar ...

, in

Jiangsu Jiangsu (; ; pinyin: Jiāngsū, Postal romanization, alternatively romanized as Kiangsu or Chiangsu) is an Eastern China, eastern coastal Provinces of the People's Republic of China, province of the China, People's Republic of China. It is o ...

province, China. The Sunway TaihuLight was the world's fastest supercomputer for two years, from June 2016 to June 2018, according to the TOP500 lists. The record was surpassed in June 2018 by IBM's

Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topography, topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used ...

Architecture

The Sunway TaihuLight uses a total of 40,960 Chinese-designed

SW26010 The SW26010 is a 260-core manycore processor designed by the Shanghai Integrated Circuit Technology and Industry Promotion Center (ICC for short)( Chinese: 上海集成电路技术与产业促进中心 (简称ICC)). It implements the Sunway architec ...

manycore Manycore processors are special kinds of multi-core processors designed for a high degree of parallel processing, containing numerous simpler, independent processor cores (from a few tens of cores to thousands or more). Manycore processors are use ...

64-bit RISC processors based on the Sunway architecture. Each processor chip contains 256 processing cores, and an additional four auxiliary cores for system management (also RISC cores, just more fully featured) for a total of 10,649,600 CPU cores across the entire system. The processing cores feature 64 KB of

scratchpad memory Scratchpad memory (SPM), also known as scratchpad, scratchpad RAM or local store in computer terminology, is a high-speed internal memory used for temporary storage of calculations, data, and other work in progress. In reference to a microprocess ...

for data (and 16 KB for instructions) and communicate via a

network on a chip A network on a chip or network-on-chip (NoC or )This article uses the convention that "NoC" is pronounced . Therefore, it uses the convention "a" for the indefinite article corresponding to NoC ("a NoC"). Other sources may pronounce it as an ...

, instead of having a traditional

cache hierarchy Cache hierarchy, or multi-level caches, refers to a memory architecture that uses a hierarchy of memory stores based on varying access speeds to cache data. Highly requested data is cached in high-speed access memory stores, allowing swifter access ...

Software

The system runs on its own operating system, Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5, which is based on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

. The system has its own customized implementation of OpenACC 2.0 to aid the parallelization of code.

Future development

China's first

exascale Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second ( exa FLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance. Exasca ...

supercomputer was scheduled to enter service by 2020 according to the head of the school of computing at the

National University of Defense Technology The National University of Defense Technology (NUDT; ) is a National university, national Public university, public research university in Changsha, Hunan, China. Founded in 1953 as the People's Liberation Army Military Academy of Engineering, ...

(NUDT). According to the national plan for the next generation of high performance computers, the country would have develop an exascale computer during the 13th Five-Year-Plan period (2016–2020). The government of Tianjin Binhai New Area, NUDT and the

National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin The National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin () is located at the National Defense Science and Technology University in Tianjin, People's Republic of China, China. One of the fastest supercomputers in the world (see "The TOP500 Project" list of sup ...

are working on the project. The investment is likely to hit 3 billion yuan ($470.6 million).

References

External links

Top500 list entry for the Sunway TaihuLight

CCTV video news story on Sunway TaihuLight

Hardware of Sunway TaihuLight
* - BBC 5-minute video {{coord, 31, 32, 55.01, N, 120, 14, 52.94, E, region:CN_type:landmark, display=title 2016 in technology Petascale computers Supercomputers Supercomputing in China 64-bit computers

Architecture

Software

Future development

See also

References

External links