China started operating supercomputers some two decades after the first supercomputer was fielded with the "Yinhe-1" in 1983. According to IDC, while Chinese organizations supplied 88.1% of the TOP500-class supercomputers installed in China in November 2015, 108 of the 109 systems—99.1%—used American processor technology, including Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron, and IBM Power processors. Qian identified several weaknesses in China's HPC development, including a "lack of some kernel technologies", weak HPC applications, reliance on imported commercial software, unsustainable HPC environment development, and a shortage of HPC talent. Supercomputers in China are concentrated in National Supercomputing Centres, which provide computing power to universities, government departments and technology firms. These are supported at the national level by the Computer Network Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which operates the China National Grid of networked supercomputers. China experienced rapid growth in computing power during the first two decades of the 2000s by purchase of non-Chinese components, and was able to reach first on the well-known TOP500 list in 2011 with the Tianhe-1A, followed later by the Tianhe-2, and Sunway TaihuLight. The Tianhe-1 and Tianhe-2 were built using Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs, while Sunway TaihuLight used domestically produced manycore processors. Lenovo also expanded to become a major vendor of supercomputing systems internationally.
History The origins of supercomputing in China and the National Supercomputing Centres goes back to the 1980s, when the State Planning Commission, the State Science and Technology Commission and the World Bank jointly launched a project to develop networking and supercomputer facilities in China. In addition to network facilities, the project included three supercomputer centers. The country's most powerful supercomputer placed 43rd in November 2002 (DeepComp 1800), 11th by November 2003 (DeepComp 6800), 10th by June 2004 (Dawning 4000A), and by November 2010 (Tianhe-1A) held top spot. China would go on to fall behind Japan in June 2011 until June 2013 when the country's most powerful supercomputer once again clocked in as the world record. Prior to the Sunway TaihuLight, Chinese supercomputers used "off the shelf" processors, with Intel and Nvidia chips used for Tianhe-I and Tianhe-2, running variants of Linux. Early domestic hardware developments included the Loongson CPU, a variant of the MIPS type architecture This was developed without a license and they were unable to market them as MIPS-compatible, until an agreement in 2007 with STMicroelectronics paved the way for MIPS licensure in 2011. According to the MIT Technology Review, the Loongson processor would power the Dawning supercomputers by 2012, producing a line of totally Chinese-made supercomputers that reach petaflops speeds. In November 2015, China increased its number of supercomputers on the TOP500 list to 109, up 196% from 37 just six months earlier. This expansion reflected growing investment in domestic innovation, with observers noting that "the Chinese government and companies want to become the creators and not just producer of products that are being designed elsewhere". In 2016, China's Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer became the world's fastest, achieving a peak performance of 93 petaflops. It was nearly three times faster than the next most powerful machine, Tianhe-2, which relied on American processing cores. That year also marked the first time China surpassed the United States in total installed supercomputing capacity. China led in the number of systems on the TOP500 list, with 167 supercomputers compared to 165 from the United States. In 2018, China extended its lead in the number of supercomputers on the TOP500 list, with 206 systems compared to 124 from the United States. While the United States regained the top spot for the fastest individual machine, the list showed that China remained the most prolific producer of supercomputers. In April 2021, seven Chinese supercomputing entities were added to the Entity List of the United States Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security. The U.S. government cited their involvement in supporting China's military modernization and weapons development programs. Placement on the list subjects these entities to additional license requirements for exports, re-exports, and in-country transfers of items subject to U.S. export regulations.
The scope of these restrictions widened in March 2025, when over 50 additional China-based firms were added to the Entity List. The U.S. government said the companies had sought advanced technologies in supercomputing, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing for military applications. The Commerce Department stated that 27 entities had acquired U.S.-origin items to support China's military modernization, while seven were involved in advancing China's quantum technology capabilities. The agency said the expanded restrictions were part of broader efforts to limit Beijing's access to sensitive technologies, including exascale computing and high-performance AI chips. Since 2022, Chinese institutions have reduced and then stopped submitting new supercomputers to the Top500 rankings, and their share of top positions has fallen. However, new systems in the exaFLOPS range not submitted to the list include the OceanLight and Tianhe-3 ("Xingyi") exaFLOPS range machines.
Supercomputing Centers
Shanghai Supercomputer Center The Shanghai Supercomputer Center was founded in the year 2000. It becamse China's first public high-performance computing center. It started with the 384 GFLOPS Shenwei-I and eventually expanded to include the Dawning 4000A, Magic Cube, Magic Cube II, and Magic Cube III, reaching some 3.3 PFLOPS by 2020. Research has included meteorology, environmental monitoring, civil engineering, aerospace, shipbuilding, industrial simulation, scientific research, big data, AI, and COVID-19-related drug screening and hospital-design work.
National Supercomputing Centers
Tianjin
National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin
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