The nation's biggest high-performance computer maker, Dawning
Information Industry Co Ltd, said yesterday that it would make the
fastest supercomputer in China, which would make the country one of
the world leaders in the field.
Dawning said in Beijing that it would cooperate with the
National Research Center for Intelligent Computing System and US
semiconductor giant Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to develop a Red
Grid program.
The product will be named the Dawning 4000A and will have a peak
speed of 10,000 giga-floating point operations per second (Gflops),
slower than only those setups in the Earth Simulator Center in
Japan and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United
States.
The previous high ranking for a Chinese company on the world's
Top 500 Supercomputer chart was 43rd, garnered by the Legend Group
last year.
"The Red Grid program marked a milestone in China's development
in high-performance computing," said Shi Dinghuan, secretary
general of the Ministry of Science
and Technology.
The Dawning 4000A will adopt cluster computing technology by
integrating a collection of computers to cooperatively work as a
single computing source.
A supercomputer made with cluster computing technology only
costs about one-quarter of those with vector or mainframe
technologies, according to Li Guojie, an academic of the Chinese
Academy of Science.
The supercomputer will have more than 2,000 AMD Opteron
processors.
This is the first time that a Chinese supercomputer maker uses
AMD's Opteron processors, and previously the chips by AMD's
arch-rival Intel are the most favored choice.
Dawning President Li Jun said the high-performance and good
compatibility between 32-bit and 64-bit computing by Opteron was a
major factor in cooperating with AMD.
However, he said that all the software, main boards and
stability designs are all invented by the Chinese.
The design of the Dawning 4000A has been completed and the
finished product will be delivered to customers in June.
The supercomputer will be endorsed by weather forecasts, oil
exploration, research organizations and other sectors.
(China Daily July 24, 2003)