In June 2004, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy released the latest global supercomputer list at that time, ranking the “Sunway 4000A” supercomputer developed by Sunway Computer Company in tenth place, with a computing speed of 80.61 trillion operations per second.
In April 2005, the “Loongson 2” CPU, China’s first general-purpose high-performance CPU with independent intellectual property rights, developed by the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, was officially unveiled. The “Loongson 2” supports 64-bit Linux operating systems and the X-Window system, providing smoother support for window systems, desktop office applications, web browsing, DVD playback, and more compared to the 32-bit “Loongson 1”.
Loongson 2
In October 2009, the National University of Defense Technology successfully developed the “Tianhe-1” supercomputer, which achieved a peak performance of 12.06 petaflops. The “Tianhe-1” supercomputer ranked first in the “Top 500 Supercomputers” list in November 2010.
The successful development of “Tianhe-1” marked China’s entry into the international advanced ranks in the field of supercomputers.
In November 2015, “Tianhe-2” topped the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers for six consecutive times.
Tianhe-2
In June 2016, the “Sunway TaihuLight” developed by the National Parallel Computer Engineering Technology Research Center replaced “Tianhe-2” at the top of the list. It not only operates nearly twice as fast as the second-place “Tianhe-2” but also improves efficiency by three times.
Sunway TaihuLight
In November 2017, “Sunway TaihuLight” won the championship for the fourth time with a floating-point operation speed of 930 petaflops.
As the inventor of the ancient calculator, the abacus, China has achieved the fastest computing tools in history, surpassing the total number of supercomputers listed in the world, ranking first globally.
Note: This content is excerpted from the “Fundamentals of Computer Applications (5th Edition)” published by Science Press, edited by Nie Yufeng, Deng Juan, and Zhou Bing. If there are any copyright issues, please contact for removal.