Supercomputing in China

The Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer

China started operating supercomputers some two decades after the first supercomputer was fielded with the "Yinhe-1" in 1983.

According to IDC, while Chinese organizations supplied 88.1% of the TOP500-class supercomputers installed in China in November 2015, 108 of the 109 systems—99.1%—used American processor technology, including Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron, and IBM Power processors.

Qian identified several weaknesses in China's HPC development, including a "lack of some kernel technologies", weak HPC applications, reliance on imported commercial software, unsustainable HPC environment development, and a shortage of HPC talent.

Supercomputers in China are concentrated in National Supercomputing Centres, which provide computing power to universities, government departments and technology firms. These are supported at the national level by the Computer Network Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which operates the China National Grid of networked supercomputers.

China experienced rapid growth in computing power during the first two decades of the 2000s by purchase of non-Chinese components, and was able to reach first on the well-known TOP500 list in 2011 with the Tianhe-1A, followed later by the Tianhe-2, and Sunway TaihuLight. The Tianhe-1 and Tianhe-2 were built using Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs, while Sunway TaihuLight used domestically produced manycore processors. Lenovo also expanded to become a major vendor of supercomputing systems internationally.