China beats US in world supercomputer ranking

[Deleted]

Source: https://next.ft.com/content/fe7ece32...5-82a9b15a8ee7

China has passed the US in a global ranking of top supercomputers, underscoring the country’s ambitions to further boost its homegrown computing and chipmaking power.

For the first time, the fastest supercomputer in the world is one that was made entirely using Chinese-made processors, in contrast to the past three years when the fastest machine was made in China but used US chips.

Supercomputers are typically used by governments and research institutions for highly complex computations in areas ranging from nuclear energy to astrophysics to life sciences.

The number of Chinese-based supercomputers on the list also surpassed the number of US machines, according to the TOP500 ranking published on Monday.

The top-ranked machine, the Sunway TaihuLight, was built in Wuxi, eastern China by the National Research Center of Parallel Computing and Engineering, a state-funded group.

It displaced the Tianhe-2, a Chinese system built with Intel chips that had topped the list for several years. Last year the US blocked Intel from shipping faster chips to the Tianhe-2 on national security grounds.

“The latest list marks the first time since the inception of the TOP500 that the US is not home to the largest number of systems,” wrote the authors of the ranking. “With a surge in industrial and research installations registered over the last few years, China leads with 167 systems and the US is second with 165.”

The European region also slipped in the ranking, and sits behind Asia and the US in terms of number of supercomputers.

While China has made great progress in processing chips such as those used in the supercomputers, the country is still a major importer of memory chips and this has been identified as a strategic priority by Beijing.

Pierre Ferragu, tech analyst at Bernstein, said the ranking showed that China was “pulling together all the building blocks of an independent semiconductor value chain.”

However he added that Chinese tech companies still have a long way to go to develop a fully fledged commercial chip ecosystem that could challenge the likes of Intel and ARM. “It still has to prove it can develop its own leading edge manufacturing capabilities,” he said.

Chinese tech companies have been increasingly active in acquiring and buying stakes in foreign chipmakers as the industry goes through a period of consolidation.

Last year Tsinghua Unigroup considered making a $23bn bid for Micron Technologies and later agreed to buy a stake in Western Digital, but neither of the deals panned out.

China Resources Microelectronics and Hua Capital Management also made an offer for Fairchild earlier this year, although Fairchild rejected the deal on the grounds that it risked being rejected by US regulators.

Other supercomputers that topped the ranking include machines from IBM, Fujitsu and Cray. Intel provided the processors for more than 90 per cent of the machines in the ranking.

The TOP500 ranking is published by Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, Jack Dongarra, a professor computer science at the University of Tennessee, and Martin Meuer of ISC Group.