Chinese scientists have reached an important breakthrough in the field of computing technologies, introducing the world to a new Sunway Oceanlight supercomputer. Created by the National Research Center of Parallel Computing Technology and Technology in the Street, in the province of Jiangsu, it is an improved version of its predecessor, Sunway Taihulight, which previously held the first place in the list of the fastest supercomputers in the world.
Sunway Oceanlight works based on the updated Sunway SW26010 PRO CPU – also a modified version used in Taihulight. The improvements have affected the clock frequency, set of instructions, and memory bandwidth, which has made it possible to increase productivity by four times.
In response to American sanctions and technological restrictions, Chinese scientists increased the number of cores in Sunway Oceanlight, achieving a speed of 5 exaflops, which is close to the performance of the American supercomputer Frontier with its 9.95 exaflops. Despite the increased energy consumption and operating costs, this solution has enabled the creation of a truly powerful machine.
Sunway Oceanlight also surpasses leading supercomputers in computing efficiency, supporting over 85% of its peak performance during normal operation. The developers have integrated more than 100,000 chips and over 41 million cores into the system, significantly exceeding the 8.7 million cores of Frontier.
The scientific community suggests that China may secretly be working on even more impressive projects, as well as developing new chips to enhance its computational capabilities.
Sunway Oceanlight can be seen as a symbol of China’s drive for technological independence. However, despite its impressive characteristics, the SW26010-Pro processor still cannot compete with the most advanced global counterparts. In any case, scientists will have to explore alternative methods to increase the performance of supercomputers given the current restrictions.