China unveils new supercomputer
By Sumner Lemon
Posted: 11:20am Thursday, January 14, 1999
China's National Research Center for Intelligent Computing Systems has developed a supercomputer capable of processing 20 billion floating point operations per second (20 Gflops), according to a Mainland press report.
According to the report, the Dawning 2000-I system architecture incorporates parallel processing and clustering technology.
While the report did not provide more specifics of the Dawning 2000-I architecture, its predecessor, the Dawning 1000 Plus, achieved a sustained floating point performance level of 1.5 Gflops with a parallel processing architecture that employed eight 200MHz Power PC 604-based nodes with 256M of RAM and a 2G local hard disk. The Dawning 1000 Plus was based on IBM's AIX operating system.
Very few companies are currently capable of developing high-performance servers that can match the performance of the Dawning 2000-I, said Chief Designer Xu Zhiwei.
"Overall, the super server has met the world's advanced standards. Some aspects of it, such as the cluster operating system, the integrated parallel programming environment and the server software accumulation are in fact world leaders," Xu said.
The Dawning 2000-I is expected to find applications within the oil, meteorology, water conservancy, energy and aviation sectors.
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