Chinese Petascale Supercomputers

China's national supercomputing centers produced two of the machines that topped the world rankings in the 2010s, each built domestically rather than around licensed foreign processor designs. Tianhe-2, developed by a team of about 1,300 scientists and engineers and installed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, reached 33.86 petaflops and led the TOP500 list from mid-2013 to mid-2016. The Sunway TaihuLight, designed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi in Jiangsu province, succeeded it atop the list running entirely on Chinese-designed Sunway processors, debuting at nearly three times the speed of the machine it displaced. Its name, meaning divine power and the light of Taihu Lake, reflects the same state-backed national computing strategy that also produced Tianhe-2.