Analysis.CastroMedia.org

Description

The People’s Republic of China operates a national network of supercomputing facilities supporting research, industry, and military applications.

Scope

  • Sunway centers host systems such as Sunway TaihuLight and the exascale Sunway Oceanlite prototype, providing multiple exaflops of throughput.12
  • The Tianhe line, including Tianhe-2A in Guangzhou and the forthcoming Tianhe-3, expands capacity across the national supercomputing infrastructure.3
  • Recent plans call for 36 government-backed data centers with up to 115,000 high-end NVIDIA GPUs for AI, potentially adding roughly 1×10^20 INT8 operations per second.4

Combined, these state-run machines provide roughly 3×10^19 dense INT8 operations per second. Further data is needed to quantify numerous regional centers and commercial partnerships.

Implications

China’s broad supercomputing deployment underpins domestic AI research and high-performance computing, enhancing technological autonomy while raising geopolitical competition concerns. Control over significant compute also supports advanced surveillance and military modernization.

Works cited

  1. TOP500, “Sunway TaihuLight,” 2016. https://www.top500.org/system/179852 ↩

  2. HPCwire, “China Quietly Builds Exascale Supercomputers,” 2021. https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/09/23/china-quietly-builds-exascale-supercomputers/ ↩

  3. National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou, “Tianhe-2A Overview,” 2020. https://www.nscc-gz.cn/en ↩

  4. PC Gamer, “China plans 36 data centers with 115,000 Nvidia GPUs,” 2024. https://www.pcgamer.com/china-115000-nvidia-gpus/ ↩