Quintillion calculator is China's big weapon
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, January 18, 2017
China plans to develop a prototype "exascale" computer before 2018, as it seeks to win a global race to be the first to build a machine capable of a billion, billion calculations per second.
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Quintillion calculator is China's big weapon |
If successful, the achievement would cement its place as a leading power in the world of supercomputing.
Last June, China built the world's fastest supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight machine — twice as fast as the previous number one.
Sunway used only locally made microchips, making it the first time a country has taken the top spot without using US technology.
Exascale computers are even more powerful, and can execute at least 1 quintillion (a billion billion) calculations per second.
Though a prototype was in the pipeline, a complete version of such a machine would take a few more years to complete. Xinhua news agency yesterday cited Zhang Ting, application engineer at the National Supercomputer Center in the port city of Tianjin, as saying "a complete computing system of the exascale supercomputer and its applications can only be expected in 2020." It would be 200 times more powerful than the country's first petaflop computer Tianhe-1, recognized as the world's fastest in 2010, said Zhang.
The exascale computer could have applications in big data and cloud computing work, he added, noting that its prototype would lead the world in data transmission efficiency as well as calculation speed.
As of last June, China for the first time had more top-ranked supercomputers than the US, according to a survey by supercomputer tracking website Top500.org.
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