China Secretly Built The World's Fastest Supercomputers

Chinese scientists have become more secretive since a series of US moves over the past nine years to slow the country’s technological progress and have stopped taking part in the Top500 competition which ranks the world’s fastest supercomputers, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, which noted that supercomputers are seen as a key technological gauge because faster computers could give an advantage in developing military weapons or other tech breakthroughs.

But Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee professor who co-founded the Top500, told the Journal that China has computers which are faster than the US machines rated as the best in the world in June, but they “just haven’t submitted the results” because Beijing fears the US might take even tougher action if they brag about their supercomputing abilities.

Five Chinese supercomputing organizations were put on a US blacklist in 2019 for using their machines for military and nuclear purposes, which means US companies can no longer sell them chips and other parts, and they have to rely on locally made processors, it said, adding that a scientific paper last year described China’s Sunway supercomputer as having 39 million cores (parts of chips that do processing), which was four times the number of cores that Frontier, the top rated US supercomputer, has.