China reportedly built the world's fastest supercomputer in June but has not made the announcement public.
Chinese scientists have become more secretive about their supercomputer research, according to the WSJ, and have stopped submitting applications to the Top500 ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers. The move is aimed at avoiding nine years of US regulations that have slowed China's technological progress.
Building supercomputers is considered an important measure of technology, as faster machines can provide an advantage in developing military weapons or other breakthroughs.
Jack Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee and co-founder of Top500, said China may have built the world's fastest supercomputer in June but "didn't submit the results." He said they may have feared that the US would take tougher action if they showed off their new achievements.
Five Chinese supercomputer builders were blacklisted by the US in 2019 for using their machines for military and nuclear purposes. This meant US companies could not sell chips and other components to them. They had to rely on older technology and Chinese-made processors.
Last year, a scientific report found that China's Sunway supercomputer had 39 million cores (the parts of a chip that do the processing), four times the number of cores in Frontier. In the ranking announced in April this year, Frontier is still the world's most powerful supercomputer with a capacity of 1.19 exaflops, or 1.19 trillion calculations per second. The system is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee (USA) and started operating in August 2022.
Supercomputers operate on the same principles as conventional computers, but with much higher performance. Unlike desktop computers or laptops, they process huge data files and perform calculations at incredible speeds. These fastest computers in the world require large infrastructure to operate, including advanced cooling systems. They are currently applied in many fields such as simulating nuclear missile tests, weather forecasting, climate research, and testing the encryption power of computers.
The Top500 supercomputer ranking has been conducted since 1993 by famous experts such as Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee; Knoxville, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the US Energy Research Center for Scientific Computing; Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim... The rankings are announced twice a year, either online or at the International Supercomputing Conference and the annual ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference.