Exclusive | US guru says China’s supercomputer power may exceed all countries but flies under the radar because of sanctions
- Jack Dongarra, professor, Turing laureate and co-founder of TOP500 supercomputer list, says China still produces the most ultra-fast computers
- He speculates having the world’s No 1 computer may ‘cause the US to take actions against China that would further restrict technologies from flowing into China’
The Chinese exascale computers, like their United States counterpart at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, are expected to perform at least one quintillion – or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 – calculations per second and they may have a higher peak performance, said Turing Award laureate and University of Tennessee professor Jack Dongarra.
Dongarra said Chinese scientists seemed to be “quite proud of the machines they have”, even though those machines have never appeared on the TOP500 list – the most influential ranking of the 500 fastest supercomputer systems in the world.
Dongarra, who attended a workshop on exascale high-performance computing software and algorithms in Beijing last month, made the comments in an interview with the South China Morning Post after his return to the US.
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“It’s a well known situation that China has these computers, and they have been operating for a while. They have not run the benchmarks, but [the community has] a general idea of their architectures and capabilities based on research papers published to describe the science coming out of those machines,” he said.
