New Sunway: how China has sidestepped US sanctions on its most powerful supercomputers

Details of the Chinese supercomputer, the Sunway OceanLight, which uses a home-grown chip, have been revealed at a US conference

The Chinese computer boasts the second-most powerful system in the world, only beaten by US supercomputer the Frontier

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The Sunway OceanLight, a new iteration of the Chinese supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight (pictured) has been discussed at a US conference, hinting at how China has circumvented US sanctions to build one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 4:00pm, 2 Dec 2023

China has unveiled one of its secret top-performing supercomputers, which was built under US sanctions.

Powered by an upgraded home-grown chip, the new Sunway supercomputer boasts a performance that is second only to the world’s most powerful system – the Frontier – which was built and hosted by the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

According to a Chinese computer scientist who asked not to be named, the new Sunway is not the most powerful supercomputer in China at present. But after details of it were given at the Supercomputing 2023 (SC23) conference in Denver, US, earlier this month, it gave the public some hints on how China has managed to sidestep US sanctions to build its own supercomputers.

While the home-grown chips the new Sunway uses are not as powerful as the US version, the Chinese scientists have instead increased the number of cores in the machine. This does, however, increase energy consumption, size and cost of running the supercomputer.

But despite the drawbacks of the measures needed to circumvent the US sanctions, the result is a fast and powerful machine. The supercomputer has a speed of a billion billion operations per second, expressed as 5 floating-point operations per second (exaflops) under a benchmark called “HPL mixed precision”, a technical way of measuring the performance of supercomputers. It is just below the performance of Frontier which has a score of 9.95 exaflops. The new Sunway also has more than 41 million CPU cores – nearly five times as many as Frontier.

This Chinese dark horse has also outdone leading supercomputers, including the Frontier, in computing efficiency. It can maintain over 85 per cent of its peak performance in regular operation, ranking the highest among all heterogeneous systems – a type of common supercomputing architecture – and second among all systems.

Meanwhile, China’s most powerful supercomputer remains undisclosed and other supercomputing chips are also under development, according to the Chinese scientist who works at a top mainland university.

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