China Builds Exascale Supercomputer with 19.2 Million Cores

Tianhe
(Image credit: Top500.org/News.cn)

After the U.S. government imposed crippling sanctions against select Chinese high-tech and supercomputer companies through 2019 and 2020, firms like Huawei had to halt chip development; it is impossible to build competitive processors without access to leading-edge nodes. But Jiangnan Computing Lab, which develops Sunway processors, and National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi kept building new supercomputers and recently even submitted results of their latest machine for the Association for Computing Machinery's Gordon Bell prize.

The new Sunway supercomputer built by the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi (an entity blacklisted in the U.S.) employs around feature approximately 19.2 million cores across 49,230 nodes, reports Supercomputing.org. To put the number into context, Frontier, the world's highest-performing supercomputer, uses 9472 nodes and consumes 21 MW of power. Meanwhile, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi does not disclose power consumption of its latest system.

Meanwhile, engineers revealed the workload that it used the machine for. Apparently, the the group created a new code for large whirlpool simulations to address compressible currents in turbomachinery. They applied it to NASA’s grand challenge problem using an advanced unstructured solver for a high-pressure turbine sequence with 1.69 billion mesh components and 865 billion degrees of freedom (variables).

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.