by Jeff Pao 

    China is expected to complete the construction of a site in Shenzhen for its third exascale supercomputer in 2025, aiming to show its determination to bypass the United States’s sanctions.

    An exascale supercomputer is more than a million times faster than the US Department of Energy (DOE)’s Intel ASCI Red supercomputer, which was launched in 1996 with a speed of 1.06 teraflops. “Exa” means 18 zeros while “tera” means 12 zeros.

    The US currently has two exascale machines: the Frontier at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee and DOE’s Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Frontier is the world’s fastest supercomputer with a peak speed of 1.68 exaflops.

    China also has two exascale supercomputers: Sunway TaihuLight at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSC) in Wuxi and Tianhe-3 at the NSC in Tianjin. One more prototype exascale system is based in the NSC in Shenzhen.

    Jack Dongarra, a winner of the Turing Award in 2022 and a co-editor of the Top500 List, told the South China Morning Post on September 14 that all three exascale supercomputers in China may already be up and running.

    He said China may exceed all countries in terms of supercomputing power but the country stays low-profile to avoid more US sanctions.

    His comments have drawn a lot of attention from hardware fans and technology columnists.

    Tom’s Hardware, a digital media company, published an article headlined, “China may have unmatched supercomputer abilities, third exascale machines apparently online.”