Well China has not exactly been known to produce high performance micro processors. So it was a real surprise when China announced its first supercomputer the Sunway Bluelight MPP powered by micro processors made in China itself.
The Sunway might just rank in the top 20 fastest supercomputers with its ability to perform a petaflop or 1,000 trillion calculations per second. It boasts of 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors entirely designed and manufactured by a computer institute in Shanghai, China.
The announcement made during a technical meeting in Jinan, China that Sunway Bluelight was installed in September at the National Supercomputer Center has surprised everyone around the globe including computing specialist in the US.Supposedly, China is about three generations behind in state-of-art chip making from advanced countries like United States, Japan and South Korea.
Tianhe 1-A
The surprise stems from the fact that China had made a supercomputer named Tianhe-1A last year end as well which was powered by processors made by American chip makers Intel and Nvidia. Though the internal design for the Tianhe1-A was made by Chinese engineers, it can be assumed that China did not have that advance microprocessors to build the machine entirely by themselves.
Fujitsu’s K Computer
The Tianhe1-A generated was in the news for quite a while for being the world’s fastest supercomputer before being displaced by the K Computer, a rival machine made by Fujitsu in Japan. Though even the K computer used chips from Sparc, designed at Sun Microsystems.
Coming back to the Sunway Bluelight, teoretically its peak performance is supposed to be around 74% of what the Jaguar supercomputer is capable of at the Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and is currently the third fastest machine in the world. Besides, the other surprising fact about the Sunway is the fact that it consumes only one megawatt of power in comparison to Tianhe which consumes about four or seven megawatt in the Jaguar.
