Chinese supercomputer project wins top int'l prize

NANJING - A Chinese team on Friday won the 2016 ACM Gordon Bell prize, a top honor in high-performance computing, for an application running on China's fastest supercomputer.

It is the first time a Chinese team has won the award.

The project, named "10M-Core Scalable Fully-Implicit Solver for Nonhydrostatic Atmospheric Dynamics," presents a method for calculating atmospheric dynamics, according to the Association for Computing Machinery, which presented the award at the International Supercomputing Conference in Salt Lake City in the United States.

"The application can help improve global climate simulation and weather prediction," said Yang Guangwen, director of the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi.

The center, also one of the application developers, is home to Sunway Taihulight, the supercomputer that runs the application.

The award shows that Taihulight not only excels in terms of speed, but can also be a powerful platform for a wide range of applications, said Yang.

Since its launch on June 20, Sunway Taihulight has helped research teams in both China and abroad make over 100 achievements in 19 different fields, including meteorology, oceanography, aerospace and biology, Yang said.

According to the International Supercomputing Conference, China has 171 of the world's top 500 supercomputers, tied for first place with the United States.

Established in 1987, the Gordon Bell Prize is awarded each year at the annual supercomputing conference. It recognizes outstanding achievements in high-performance computing applications.