Not slowed down as much as possible by Western sanctions, China has built its own giant exascale supercomputer. It’s certainly a lot bigger than the frontier computer in the US, but efficiency and processing power are still big question marks.

China claims to have its own exascale supercomputer. It was built by the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, which is on the US sanctions list and is therefore not allowed to import advanced Western technology. So there is no room for Intel or AMD in the new system, but there is room for Sunway. Sunway chips are manufactured by China’s own Jiagnan Computing Lab, although that company no longer has access to new Western equipment for making advanced processors.

China relies on volume in its new system. Inside are 19.2 million cores spread across 49,230 nodes. The chip on duty is most likely a Sunway SW26010. This is not a new chip, but a CPU that has been on the market since 2021. China is therefore deploying on a larger scale without tinkering much with the efficiency of the underlying components.

Lots of question marks

It is therefore not surprising that the Chinese are silent about the expected power consumption. That will probably be exuberant. The currently most powerful supercomputer is Frontier in the USA. It has the most modern Epyc processors from AMD on board, distributed over “almost” 9,472 nodes and consumes 21 MW. Logically, the significantly larger and less efficient Chinese system will consume significantly more.

The effective gain in performance is also a big open question. HPC systems are not infinitely scalable. In other words, twice the knots doesn’t mean twice the horsepower. An official benchmark is currently missing. The calculator is undisputedly larger than the Sunway Oceanlite from 2021, which was already flirting with the limit of an exaflop. Presumably this system will break the barrier quite comfortably.