You probably already know that it was built and put into operation in China, where the first two most powerful supercomputers are located. The newest one is called Sunway TaihuLight and jumped straight to number 1 in Top500.org.
Here's what you should know about him:
- It is 5 times faster than the most powerful American computer, ranked third.
- For Sunway TaihuLight, the Chinese used a new processor, the Chinese 100%, which no one knew about, similar in logic to the IBM Cell and stacked in the Xeon Phi style, which is impressive. Until now, all Chinese supercomputers were based on American technology: IBM, AMD, Intel or Nvidia, as is the case with Tianhe-2, the former world leader for 3 years.
For those who didn't know, Xeon Phi is the latest example of Intel's ingenuity and laziness. More precisely, we're talking about a PCI-Express card with a cluster of 64-72 Intel Pentium 1 cores (yes, that 100 MHz processor from high school labs in the 90s) overclocked to 1.2-1.45 GHz and with HyperThreading x4 enabled.
- The Chinese processor in the Sunway TaihuLight is a 64-bit RISC and comes with 260 Cores at 1.45GHz.
- In 2001, China did not have a single computer in the Top500, and today it has 167 compared to the Americans who have 165. Taking into account the market trend, where Chinese companies buy up pretty much everything they can find on sale, combined with huge infrastructure investments, such as these supercomputers for example, it is quite clear that they expect something to happen in the near future and are pressing the accelerator as hard as they can now.
- The race is on. President Obama signed into law in 2015 to begin construction of the first computer. exascale, that is, 1000 petaflops (keep in mind that the first one on the list only has 93 petaflops). Commendable, but with current technology, it is almost impossible, because it would require a huge consumption of electricity. More precisely, if the US goes with an architecture similar to that of the Chinese at Tianhe-2, which consumes approximately 18MW for 33 petaflops, an exabyte in processing power would consume only approximately 550 MW per hour in electricity! To give you an idea of the impact, a nuclear power plant reactor generates approximately 10-15 MW per hour.
ABOUT PETAFLOPS:
In computing, FLOPS or flops (an acronym for floating-point operations per second) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating point calculations. For such cases it is a more accurate measure than the generic instructions per second.
(Source: Wikipedia)
Here is the top 10 supercomputers. It is worth noting that Japan, Switzerland, Germany and Saudi Arabia are also in the same elite club. 
(Source: Top500.org)
