New China supercomputer fast enough to match human brain

China’s new supercomputer is the first one that’s fast enough to run AI models as sophisticated as the human brain, the South China Morning Post reported.

According to Chinese researchers, the Newest Generation Sunway has a speed of a billion operations per second an over 37 million CPU cores – four times as many as Frontier, a supercomputer built by the US Department of Energy.

China has 173 supercomputers listed in the Top 500 fastest computer systems in the world. / Photo credit: Pexels

This puts the Sunway machine on par with Frontier,  which was hailed as the world’s most powerful supercomputer earlier this month.

The Chinese supercomputer also has 96,000 nodes, which are semi-independent computer systems. These nodes communicate with each other like the human brain’s synapses, which process thoughts and bodily functions.

The Sunway machine was used to train the AI model with 174 trillion parameters, matching up against the number of human synapses. AI models are a type of algorithm that uses a certain data set to recognize patterns or solve problems without human interference.

The models could potentially power the “thinking” of self-driving vehicles and facial recognition programs and be used in natural language processing.

China has 173 supercomputers listed in the Top 500 fastest computer systems in the world, surpassing other countries. But it has not submitted performance data in the last few years.

However, China has flexed its supercomputing  muscle in other ways. For instance, the Tianhe supercomputer was tapped to identify and discover pharmaceutical treatments for the coronavirus. The country has also consistently won the Gordon Bell Prize, which is awared annually by the Association of Computing Machinery, for applications that model earthquakes, atmospheric dynamics, and quantum circuits.

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