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 instructio ...

which, , is ranked fourth in the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non- 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 updates always coinci ...

list, with a

LINPACK benchmark The LINPACK Benchmarks are a measure of a system's 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'' = ''b'', which is a common ...

rating of 93 petaflops. 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 supercompute ...

, 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 China operates a number of supercomputer centers which, altogether, hold 29.3% performance share of world's fastest 500 supercomputers. China's Sunway TaihuLight ranks third in the TOP500 list. In the November 2019 list, China dominated the ...

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 a ...

, in

Jiangsu Jiangsu (; ; pinyin: Jiāngsū, alternatively romanized as Kiangsu or Chiangsu) is an eastern coastal province of the People's Republic of China. It is one of the leading provinces in finance, education, technology, and tourism, with it ...

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 topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used only for a m ...

Architecture

The Sunway TaihuLight uses a total of 40,960 Chinese-designed SW26010

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 u ...

64-bit RISC processors based on the

Sunway architecture Sunway, or Shenwei, (Chinese: ), is a series of computer microprocessors, developed by Jiangnan Computing Lab () in Wuxi, China. It uses a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture, but details are still sparse. History The Sunwa ...

. 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 microproces ...

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 a ...

, 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, whi ...

. 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 ( exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance. Exascale ...

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 public research university in Changsha, Hunan, China. Founded in 1953 as the People's Liberation Army Military Academy of Engineering, the institution is directly affilia ...

(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, China. One of the fastest supercomputers in the world (see "The TOP500 Project" list of supercomputers), Tianhe-1A ...

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