Sunway supercomputer, NRCPC China
Advances in basic computing science may not seem as exciting as other developments, but they are just as -- if not more -- important to future innovation.
China's Sunway Taihulight, designed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC), was the world's fastest supercomputer as of June 2016, said Yang Guangwen, Tsinghua University professor and director of the National Supercomputer Center at Wuxi.
With a Linpack benchmark rating of 93 petaflops, Sunway Taihulight is nearly three times as fast as the prior champion, China's Tianhe-2, which ran at 34 petaflops. The supercomputer was built with the Chinese processor chip ShenWei 26010; a 260-core, 64-bit RISC chip that exceeds 3 teraflops at maximum tilt.
It is expected to support manufacturing, life sciences, computer-aided engineering and weather forecasting.
