The role of supercomputers is often overlooked when people think about progress in their daily lives. They seem so distant and carry such mystique that they are almost otherworldly. But their economic benefits, often indirect, have been calculated at a 44:1 return on investment through cost savings or innovations.
Whether through climate and weather modeling, materials science and engineering, the life and health sciences, and many other disciplines, supercomputers enable us to run massive simulations that can then be applied to real-world products.
The contemporary supercomputer has a relatively simple, but clever architecture. Server-grade commodity system units are racked and cabled together with a high-speed interconnect between the individual units. A software layer unites the interconnected individual servers so that the entire system can run as a single unit. This provides massive capacity, the ability to run many tasks simultaneously, and the capability to run very big tasks.
The most famous supercomputer in China, the Sunway TaihuLight, is hosted at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. This system came to global attention in June 2016, when it topped the top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers (measured in total processing speed), far surpassing the second system (also Chinese, the Tianhe-2A), let alone the third (Titan, from the United States).
Not only that, Sunway TaihuLight held the top position for an unprecedented and never-repeated two years in succession. Almost 10 years later, Sunway TaihuLight has remained not only a top 500 supercomputer but also in the top 25 systems (placed No 24 in November 2025) without any change to the original hardware configuration.
Lev Lafayette stands by the Sunway TaihuLight at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. [Photo provided to wuxi.gov.cn]
I have been involved in supercomputing in Australia for almost 20 years, originally at the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing and then at the University of Melbourne. In that time, I have worked on several systems that have also been in the Top 500, including Spartan, the general-purpose system at the University of Melbourne, whose innovative cloud-HPC architecture caught some attention at the time, just as Sunway was taking the global lead.
During these years, I have literally taught thousands of researchers from around 20 Australian universities and research agencies how supercomputers work, how they are useful for their research, and how to use them.
I consider myself very fortunate to have received an invitation to visit the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi and see Sunway TaihuLight for myself at the end of March. With the deputy director and other staff acting as friendly and informative hosts, I was provided both a tour of the facilities as well as receiving answers concerning the activities and architecture of the system.
Proving the effectiveness of a scalable system, Sunway TaihuLight has dozens of applications that could, in theory, use the entire system at once and early scaling examples included atmospheric and oceanic simulations using millions of cores.
One of the marvelous things about the Sunway TaihuLight is how much of the architecture is "home-grown". Using a Chinese-designed SW26010 64-bit RISC processor, each chip contains an impressive 260 cores, arranged as four clusters of 64 Compute-Processing Elements (CPEs) in an eight-by-eight array. These CPEs support SIMD instructions, making the chip (at a very high level) seem like a blend of a traditional CPU and a GPU architecture.
Each node has 260 cores, and there are "supernodes" of 256 nodes; each cabinet holds four supernodes. There are 40 cabinets in total, providing over 10 million cores. Sunway has its own interconnect, with a five-level integrated hierarchy, a custom-built Sunway Raise OS, based on Linux, and a customized version of OpenACC.
Sunway node. [Photo provided to wuxi.gov.cn]
The Sunway TaihuLight will be remembered alongside other systems that are "giants" in history for their performance, architecture, and lasting impact, and contributions to science, such as ENIAC, UNIVAC, CDC-6600, Cray-1, Beowulf, and RoadRunner. All the engineers and administrators who have built, operated, and maintained this system deserve enormous respect for their contributions.
And to add a bit of nature to this story, my visit to Wuxi also fell during the city's Cherry Blossom Festival, where the Taihu Lake and its scenic parklands were a place of human enjoyment and natural beauty. I am very happy to visit Wuxi again, and honored to visit the city's supercomputing center.
The author is a Senior HPC DevOps Engineer at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
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