After the United States had taken the top spot for having the fastest supercomputer in 2018, China is now ramping up its efforts to regain the position it once held for a number of years. The country has recently announced plans to invest billions of dollars to upgrade its current supercomputer infrastructure to regain its leadership in the particular industry.
China announced that it will be significantly upgrading its Shuguang supercomputers to operate 50 percent faster than the fastest supercomputer in the United States; a title currently held by a supercomputer called the Summit. The upgrade will reportedly cost billions of dollars but will be well worth it given its economic advantages.
Having the fastest supercomputer is seen by the world is an important metric for any nation's technical prowess. These machines can be used for various tasks, which includes weather predictions, nuclear simulations, and even in developing new energy technologies. The demand for commercial supercomputers has also recently risen, with different companies now developing advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and neural networks.
China's next-generation supercomputer will reportedly be developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing and will be pitted with other supercomputers to be ranked according to their processing capabilities. Under the Obama administration, the United States was able to overtake China through the creation of the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), which was tasked with developing exascale supercomputers. Exascale supercomputers are computers that are able to process at least a quintillion calculations per second.
When it comes to supercomputer development, China and the United States are currently in the lead and are at each other's throats for the top spot. Lagging behind both countries are nations like Japan and the United Kingdom. China originally began to develop its own supercomputers without any foreign components right after Obama had banned the sale of high-end processors to China. In 2016, China unveiled its TaihuLight supercomputer, which used a locally developed processor called the Matrix-2000. The machine quickly took the top stop in the Top 500 list as the fastest supercomputer in the world.
According to technology and economic analysts, the development of faster supercomputers will be vital to the country's economic future given the huge processing demand of newer technologies such as 5G networks and artificial intelligence. The internal demand for higher supercomputing capacity needs to be addressed and the country will need to invest a lot of money for it to remain competitive.
Reports have revealed that the funds, which will come from the central government and various other agencies, will be used to upgrade three supercomputing facilities. This will include the National Supercomputing Centre of Tianjin, the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, and the Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology.
