China starts building exascale computer

China has started building a supercomputer that should reach peak performance of almost 1 exaflops. This means that one of three projects in China for exascale supercomputers has been launched. It is not known when the system should be ready.

The cluster is being built by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology at the National Supercomputing Center in Jinan. According to the Chinese state medium Xinhua, the system will be ten times as powerful as the current fastest supercomputer.

That is the Chinese Sunway Taihulight, which has a peak performance of 93 petaflops on the Linpack benchmark. The system now under construction is expected to perform somewhere between 930 petaflops and 1 exaflop. An exaflops means 1018 floating point operations per second.

According to a spokesman for the National Supercomputing Center in Jinan, the construction will be a test for deploying technology developed by China. China has three exascale projects on the agenda, but it is not known when the first system should be ready. 167 of the systems are now in the Top500 list of supercomputers on Chinese soil. The EU has set itself the target of commissioning the first exascale systems by 2020.