The United States stands to regain the title as creator of the world's fastest supercomputer in 2018 when "Summit," an IBM-built supercomputer rated at 200 petaFLOPS becomes operational.

China early this week announced it had built the world's fastest supercomputer, the Sunway TiahuLight system with a LINPACK benchmark score of 93 petaFLOPS and a claimed peak of 124.5 petaFLOPS. Sunway TaihuLight is the first system in the world to exceed 100 petaFLOPS.

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Sunway TaihuLight is five times faster than Titan, the 17 petaFLOPS machine installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, which is the fastest supercomputer in the United States. Titan is currently number three on the TOP500 list of supercomputers worldwide. Summit will also be installed at ORNL.

Sunway TaihuLight is nearly three times faster than the world's previous number one system, China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which was the world's fastest for past three years.

TaihuLight, which is installed at China's National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, uses ShenWei CPUs developed by Jiangnan Computing Research Lab in Wuxi. The operating system is a Linux-based Chinese system called Sunway Raise.

IBM's Summit will employ IBM Power9 and Nvidia Volta GPUs. It will deliver over five times the computational performance of Titan's 18,688 nodes using only about 3,400 nodes. Each node will have "over half a terabyte" of coherent memory (HBM + DDR4) plus 800 GB of non-volatile RAM that serves as a burst buffer or extended memory.

China describes Sunway TaihuLight as a "domestically designed supercomputer," meaning the supercomputer was built it in-house and doesn't use processor or accelerator technology from U.S. companies like Intel and Nvidia.

Sunway TaihuLight is currently running "sizeable applications" that include advanced manufacturing, earth systems modeling, life science and big data applications.

The U.S. banned the sale of supercomputer microchips to China because it claimed China was using its Tianhe-2 supercomputer for nuclear explosive testing activities. Tianhe-2, which has a peak performance of 54.9 petaFLOPS, uses Intel Xeon processors.

TagsIBM, Summit supercomputer, china, Sunway TaihuLight