China's Sunway TaihuLight, which is capable of performing 93 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflop/s), has replaced the country's Tianhe-2 as the world's most powerful supercomputer.
The Top500 supercomputer list has been ranking supercomputers across the world every six months since 1993.
Tianhe-2 had been heading the list for the past three years, and the basic difference between China's top two supercomputers is that Sunway TaihuLight uses chips made entirely in China while Tianhe02 uses Intel chips made in the United States.
More surprisingly, the latest Top500 list also shows that with 167 China has more supercomputers than the US which has 165.
China did not have a supercomputer till 2001, but within 15 years it has surpassed the US to have the highest number of supercomputers in the world, which shows the rapid development of supercomputers in the country.
China has been deeply worried about being over-reliant on foreign technology, especially after the US announced an export ban on all high-performance computing chips to China last year.
Experts say China's success in the supercomputers field, the indigenously developed Sunway TaihuLight in particular, marks a great step forward in the country's technological advancement.
It also means China has mastered the core technologies of building supercomputers and can compete in this field globally.
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