Building supercomputers is a digital arms race, and China is moving quickly to solidify its leadership. Last year, the country unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight. This year, according to state news agency Xinhua, the government has set a goal of completing the world’s first prototype supercomputer, a machine capable of performing a billion, billion calculations per second.
The prototype computer will be ready before the end of the year, said Zhang Ting, an engineer at the country's National Supercomputer Center, but the final product will not be operational for several years. "A complete exascale supercomputer and its applications can only be expected in 2020," Zhang said. It will be 200 times more powerful than Tianhe-1, which was recognized as the world's fastest in 2010.
It's not yet clear how exactly this prototype system will relate to exascale computing in terms of capacity, but the news suggests China will at least be the first to reach such a milestone. A number of nations—including Japan and the United States—are planning to build exascale computers. The U.S. Department of Energy says its current goal is to have an exascale system up and running by 2023.
As of June, China has more supercomputers in the world’s top 500—167 to be exact, compared to the U.S.’s 165. (The U.S., however, has more in the top 10—five to China’s two.) These systems are used for a variety of tasks, ranging from life sciences to national defense. In 2015, the U.S. blocked the export of Intel to China for what was then the world’s fastest supercomputer, fearing it could be used for nuclear research. China instead built an even faster system (the Sunway TaihuLight) using its own processors.
