Sunway, China’s newest supercomputer was used to train an AI model with 174 trillion parameters.

The newest generation of China’s Sunway supercomputer has reportedly stolen a march on Frontier, a computer build by the US Department of Energy, and ranked earlier this month as the world’s most powerful. According to SCMP, the Chinese machine trained an AI model dubbed “bagualu” (alchemist’s pot), with 174 trillion parameters.

That number of parameters in that AI model rivals the number of synapses in the human brain. For context, Google Brain developed last year a much-vaunted model with 1.6 trillion parameters.

The new supercomputer could be used to develop applications including in computer vision, facial recognition, and chemistry.

China says it’s brain-scale

The Sunway computer has more than 37 million CPU cores (that’s 4X that of Frontier) and a speed of a billion billion operations per second (i.e. 5.3 floating-point operations per second). It has nine petabytes of memory and 96,000 semi-independent computer systems called nodes.

Communications between these nodes take place at a speed of more than 23 petabytes per second.

The Chinese researchers claim Sunway is powerful enough to resemble a human brain, and that its ability to perform computing in parallel was similar to a human’s thought process while both eating and watching television.

The results from the AI model were presented at a virtual meeting of Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming 2022, an international conference hosted by the US-based Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in April.

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