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China’s New Mastermind: Supercomputers

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Supercomputers are essential for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. They not only accelerate but are also the core power of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Out of the 500 top supercomputers with the best performance, China currently possesses 202 of them. For the past two years, ‘Tianhe-2’ was the fastest supercomputer in the world. However, yesterday, China’s new supercomputer ‘Sunway TaihuLight’ took its place.

What is a Supercomputer?

Supercomputers are large computers that have an extremely long lifespan and a fast calculation speed. When one inputs information in a supercomputer, it naturally processes, leaving a result at the end called the output. Supercomputers consist of many smaller computers, each having a different role in processing data. The computers are connected each other to swiftly sort out pieces of information that come from different branches. Supercomputers were first created during the Second World War. The main purpose of creating a supercomputer was to decrypt the German code which succeeded and let Britain to victory. However, these days, supercomputers gather and process information necessary for national defense, space, and weather, which are crucial information for a nation. Supercomputers are

First Supercomputer ‘Cray’
Image from Archieveseducation

still used for sorting out tons of information within seconds. Imagine that you line up the entire world population and give them a problem that takes 16 days to solve. For supercomputers, it would only take a second to solve these questions.

 

Sunway, TaihuLight

The previous supercomputers were built using US-built intel processors. There were plans of upgrading the Tianhe-2, however, in 2015, the US government placed an export ban on supercomputer chips to China after feeling menace of China

dominating the computer market.  Then how did China built TaihuLight without relying on US-built intel processor? Within three years, China was able to build the fastest Intel processor chip. With ‘TaihuLight’ and ‘Tianhe-2’ in the first and second place, China has currently dominated the computer market. China now has access to a wide variety of information. Following the release of the new supercomputer, the Chinese government announced that the information would be used to invest in different fields of marketing.

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