China may be secretly sitting on the two most powerful supercomputers in the world

China English hawthorn be secretly sitting along the two most powerful supercomputers in the world

(Image credit: Shutterstock / Timofeev Vladimir)

Binary supercomputing institutions in China have built machines that have already breached the watershed exascale barrier in behind-closed-doors examination, reports suggest.

Accordant to Next Platform , which says it has the selective information on "great potency", a machine at the National Supercomputing Midpoint in Wuxi (called Sunway Oceanlite) recorded a peak score of 1.3 exaFLOPS aside the LINPACK bench mark as early as March this year.

Another system, the Tianhe-3, is said to feature achieved an almost identical score, simply it's unclear precisely when testing took place in this instance.

Although less is known about the computer architecture of the Wuxi machine, the Tianhe-3 is renowned to be based along silicon from Chinese company Phytium, boosted by a matrix atom smasher.

The exascale barrier

The record for world's fastest supercomputer is currently held by a Japanese machine, Fugaku. It snatched the treetop in June 2020 with a score of 416 petaFLOPs (or 0.416 exaFLOPs), almost threefold the flush functioning of the previous drawing card, IBM Summit.

Since then, Fugaku's top has widened with the addition of a further 330,000 cores, boosting the performance to 442 petaFLOPS. However, if reports are accurate, both Tianhe-3 and Sunway Oceanlite outstrip the current leader by almost a factor of three.

The arrival of exascale supercomputers is likely to unlock a server of opportunities in a variety of sectors. For example, this level of performance bequeath accelerate time to uncovering in fields such as clinical medication and genomics, which expect big amounts of computing power to conduct molecular model and genome sequencing.

Artificial intelligence operation (Army Intelligence) is another hybridise-disciplinary area that volition be changed with the arrival of exascale calculation. The ability to analyze ever-larger datasets bequeath improve the ability of AI models to make accurate forecasts that could be applied in virtually any context, from cybersecurity to ecommerce, manufacturing, logistics, banking and more.

As the US and People's Republic of China battle for AI supremacy, the arrival of two exascale-capable systems in China in front the US can debut its own upcoming exascale simple machine ("Frontier"), will be a kick in the dentition for the Biden administration, peculiarly given they are assembled on Chinese atomic number 14.

It's unclear why PRC did not submit its machines to the bi-yearbook Top 500 supercomputer rankings earlier this year, simply the geopolitical climate almost certainly has something to do with information technology. The next edition of the rankings is ascribable be published next calendar month.

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Joel Khalili is a Staff Writer working crossways both TechRadar In favor and ITProPortal. Helium's interested in receiving pitches around cybersecurity, information privacy, corrupt, storage, cyberspace infrastructure, mobile, 5G and blockchain.