China has classified new supercomputers and pretends that it is not developing in this area

The Chinese Society of Computer Science has published a list of the hundred most productive supercomputers in the country, which may not reflect the true state of affairs. Like last year, exascale systems were not included; Moreover, there were no new systems in it compared to last year’s edition.

Image source: Top500.org

The only difference between the lists of the hundred most powerful supercomputers in China for 2023 and 2024 was a slight increase in their total productivity. Chinese organizations may deliberately hide information about the most powerful systems so as not to provoke new sanctions from the United States. The top three now include the same supercomputers with central and graphics processors as in 2023.

The first place, according to the official version, belongs to the machine deployed in 2023 – it has 15,974,400 CPU cores and performance of up to 487.94 Pflops in the Linpack test. It is more powerful than the Japanese supercomputer Fugaku (442 Pflops, FP64), but is significantly inferior to the American exascale El Capitan (1742 Aflops), Frontier (1353 Aflops) and Aurora (1012 Aflops). The second was a supercomputer launched in 2022 – it has 460,000 CPU cores and 208.26 Pflops; The third was a system with 285,000 CPU cores and a performance of 125.04 Pflops according to Linpack. The difference in total performance in the official lists of the hundred most powerful supercomputers is minimal: in 2023 it was 1398 Eflops, and in 2024 it grew to 1406 Eflops.

But just last year, supercomputing expert Jack Dongarra said that China has at least three exascale machines with performance ranging from 1.3 to 1.7 EFLOPS, as well as a 2 EFLOPS machine with x86 processors Hygon. There has been no official confirmation of the information, but Mr. Dongarra’s words are taken seriously in the industry. Information about these systems and the specifications of the machines from the official ranking are not published, probably to hide the suppliers of components for supercomputers. Analysts are usually astute enough to identify what equipment might be used and who might be supplying it—these systems are believed to contain off-the-shelf components, many of them supplied through gray channels to circumvent U.S. sanctions. But the top ten also includes systems based on Chinese-made processors and graphics accelerators.