The machine, created at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi (near Shanghai), is called the Sunway TaihuLight. Its 40,960 260-core processors and its 1.3 petabytes of RAM give it a processing power of 93 petaflops and take it away from storage systems used in our day-to-day lives. That is, it performs 93,000 trillion floating point operations per second.
Its incredible performance is almost three times that of the Tianhe-2 (the previous most capable computer, also Chinese but with chips from the American Intel), and it is also more energy efficient than its rivals on the list of the most powerful computers in the world, prepared by the TOP500 project.
China has been at the top of this ranking for seven consecutive years, but this is the first time it has done so with a completely national machine, including processors. Not an anecdotal fact. Developing these supercomputers requires years of research, enormous investment and top-level specialists, and it shows what a country is capable of.
The Asian state has taken the throne of computing from the US, and that is an indication of where the shots are going in the 21st century. 167 of the 500 most powerful supercomputers on the planet are yours, by 165 of the Americans. The next country on the list is Japan, with 29.
In Europe, the leaders are Germany (26 supercomputers), France (18), and the United Kingdom, with 12. The only Spanish machine on the list is the Mare Nostrum, from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which ranks 105th.
