Wuxi-made supercomputer retains its throne as world's fastest

Yang Jinzhe (L2), engineer from Wuxi's National Supercomputer Center and Fu Haohuan (R2), deputy director of the center, receive the TOP500 certificate in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 19. [Photo/Xinhua]

Developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC), Sunway Taihu Light is capable of performing 93 petaflops/s (quadrillions of calculations per second), with a peak speed of 125.4 petaflops/s.

After a year of operation, the supercomputer has made great strides in helping boost the nation's many computing applications covering some 19 fields including weather forecasting, advanced manufacturing, life sciences, and big data analysis.

The research project "10M-Core Scalable Fully-Implicit Solver for Nonhydrostatic Atmospheric Dynamics" which employs high performance computing to understand weather patterns, won the 2016 ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Gordon Bell Prize, dubbed the Nobel Prize in the field of supercomputing.

It was the first time for a Chinese team to win the award since its establishment in 1987, giving exposure to China's outstanding achievements in high-performance computing.