China's homegrown Sunway TaihuLight, is the first supercomputer of its kind to only use domestically-made parts. [Photo/Xinhua]

After a year of operation, Sunway Taihu-Light has made great strides in helping boost the nation's many computing applications covering some 20 fields including weather forecasting, advanced manufacturing, life sciences, and big data analysis.

The research project "10M-Core Scalable Fully-Implicit Solver for Nonhydrostatic Atmospheric Dynamics" which employs high performance computing to understand weather patterns, won the 2016 ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Gordon Bell Prize, dubbed the Nobel Prize in the field of supercomputing.

It was the first time for a Chinese team to win the award since its establishment in 1987, giving exposure to China's outstanding achievements in high-performance computing.

According to Yang Guangwen, director of Wuxi's National Supercomputer Center and professor of Tsinghua University, two of Sunway's new computing applications have already been nominated as finalists for this year's ACM Gordon Bell Prize – one for weather research and another for earthquake simulation.

The winners will be announced at the 2017 Supercomputing Conference which takes place on local time Nov 16.