China builds one of world's fastest supercomputer

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-06-25 19:56

BEIJING -- Although missing the world's most extensive rankings for the best supercomputers, a Chinese-made high performance server rivals the 7th fastest for computing speed.

Dawning 5000A, with a capability of 160 trillions of computing operations per second, is signed to be installed in the Shanghai Supercomputer Center (SSC) which specializes in super computing outsourcing services for daunting jobs such as genome mapping, quake appraisal, precise weather forecast, mining survey and huge stock exchange data.

Nie Hua, vice president of Dawning Information Industry Co., said here Wednesday in an interview with Xinhua, "The delay in the delivery of AMD Barcelona quad-cores chips made us miss the latest rankings."

The International Supercomputing Conference released last week in Dresden, Germany, the latest competition results of the world's most powerful supercomputers, or TOP500.

The world's No. 1 system, "Roadrunner" which was built by IBM for the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), was so revolutionary that it exceeded the milestone of running one quadrillion computing operations a second, 5.4 times faster than that of Dawning 5000A.

While IBM "Roadrunner" was built for unspecified military applications, the Chinese fastest super system, covering a floor space of 75 square meters, focuses on commercial use. The vendor Dawning showcased its eye-catching performance of processing 36-hour weather forecast information on Beijing and vicinity within three minutes.

IBM occupied five slots of the top ten supercomputers. When comparing performance, Dawning 5000A followed the No. 6 IBM BlueGene/P system which has been installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ).

The scheduled completion of Dawning 5000A installation in the SSC in November might enable the system to compete the next world rankings in November.

Whether Dawning 5000A is able to remain among the top ten is questionable because of the swift development of the supercomputing industry. The FZJ IBM BlueGene/P, which computes 167.3 trillion times one second, was ranked the second in last November.

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