Sugon Corporation in Tianjin announced the start of a program to research and develop an EFlops High Performance Computer on Oct 20, the only EFlops high performance computer (HPC) program initiated by private enterprise as the 13th Five Year Plan enters a system development stage.

EFlops HPC refers to super computers that are able to conduct exascale floating point operations per second (or eFlops). Such computers are considered to rank at the top in super computers.

EFlops have become a strategic high ground in competitions among countries. Several countries including the US, European countries and Japan have developed research plans for EFlops.

Tan Ruyun, senior project director of the High-Tech Research and Development Center of the Ministry of Science and Technology, said inventing an EFlops HPC indicates a breakthrough in China's HPC system design and an improvement in computer performance.

This project will involve various research areas including calculating systems, network frameworks, storage architecture, system software, cooling systems and application support.

He added the research on E HPCs faces many challenges, especially in energy efficiency. There are other challenges in maintaining an ecological environment, reliability, application programming, storage and multi-application integration.

Li Jun, president of Sugon, said the company’s EFlops HPC program will concentrate on high performance calculating and aims at realizing EFlops industrialization.

He stressed that once the construction of the E HPC is completed, it will become a solid support for national scientific innovation and industry transformation and upgrading. Additionally, it will also promote the development of various fields such as big data, deep learning and cloud technology.

Sugon has been devoted to HPC research and development for years with the support of the "863 Program", a high-tech development plan in China. The group has invented the SG-1, the shuguang-1000 and the Petaflop super computer – a shuguang-6000 that can conduct a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.