by Li Zhuoxi

An E-class computer capable of making tens of billions of calculations per second will become the“next reigning supercomputer.” Countries including the United States and Japan have proposed development of such a computer， and China has listed it as a major technology development strategy.

On August 5， 2018， after more than two years of painstaking efforts， Chinas independently developed Sunway E-class prototype computer officially began operation at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan， capital of Shandong Province.

Core devices such as processors， network chipsets， storage and management systems are all made in China. Six applications of the prototype were selected for the Gordon Bell Award， the “Nobel Prize of supercomputing.”

For the first time， the Sunway E-class prototype computer established an artificial intelligence （AI） software ecological chain on a Chinese-made supercomputer. Based on Sunway deep learning library and framework， it features a large-scale AI application for game systems， medical image recognition and machine translation—in which it leads the world in terms of data size， parallel computing and training speed.

So far， the Sunway E-class prototype computer has completed 35 major computing tasks in 12 fields including global climate change， oceanic numerical simulation， biomedical simulation， big data processing and brain-like intelligence.

Future application prospects are broad. For example， it could upgrade the accuracy of weather forecasting from kilometers to meters to even predict the weather conditions of a specific stadium. In the field of medical R&D;， it can help shorten the development cycle for new drugs to a few weeks from a few years， which would minimize the cost of new drugs.