China reportedly has the world's most powerful supercomputer with its Tianhe-3, but the country refuses to reveal technical information. However, many details appear in the publications of researchers who have used it in their work.
Last December, China quietly announced the launch of its new supercomputer Tianhe-3, which would be the fastest in the world. And this while the country no longer has access to the latest processor technologies due to the sanctions. Rumors about the Tianhe-3 began circulating in 2017.
China no longer shares information about its machines necessary to appear in the top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, leaving the official world ranking to the United States. Technical details must therefore be accessed from scientific publications without a direct link; Research projects use the supercomputer and mention it in passing. That’s exactly what The Next Platform website did. According to their data, the Tianhe-3, nicknamed Xingyi, could achieve a peak performance of 2.05 exaflops (billion trillion floating point operations per second). Its sustained speed would be 1.57 exaflops using the High Performance Linkpack (HPL) benchmark.
A world first location that could only be short-lived
That's much more than the first supercomputer on the Top500 list, the Frontier in the United States, which achieved 1.19 exaflops with a peak of 1.68 exaflops. The Tianhe-3 uses an architecture called Matrix-3000 or MT-3000. It would be a hybrid device with processors and accelerators and three different types of memory. The Next Platform gives a very detailed description of its likely architecture and various components.
However, the Chinese advance could be short-lived. The United States is currently building a supercomputer called El Capitan that uses a similar architecture called AMD Antares MI300A. This could reach up to 2.3 exaflops, placing it first in the world.