China made a surprise move earlier this week in the race to build the supercomputer of the future. At a meeting in Jinan, China, industry and government officials announced the Sunway BlueLight MPP, a supercomputer that can perform up to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, and which is composed entirely of 8,700 Chinese ShenWei SW1600 microprocessors.

Up until this point, virtually all of the world’s major supercomputers were built based on technology designed or pioneered in the United States. While the Chinese still have not taken the lead in supercomputers – the Sunway BlueLight is thought to be about 74 percent as fast as the Jaguar, the fastest U.S. supercomputer – this recent development surprised the industry, Jack Dongarra, a leader of the Top500 project, told reporters.

Among the Chinese system’s most interesting features is the computer’s cooling system. “Getting this cooling technology correct is very, very difficult,” Steven Wallach, a supercomputer scientist, told reporters. “This tells me that this is a serious design. This cooling technology could scale to exaflop. They are in the hunt to win.”

Read more at The New York Times ^[1].