Han Ximin

    SUPERCOMPTER Dawn 6000, which performs 1.27 quadrillion (1.27 petaflops) calculations per second at peak speed, was in full operation at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen yesterday.

    The system was developed jointly by Dawning Information Industry Co. Ltd. and the Calculation Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is the fourth-fastest computing system in the world.

    Li Jun, president of Dawning Information Industry Co. Ltd., said Dawn 6000 was the most advanced technology in the Dawning family. At a launching ceremony yesterday, he said it would be mainly used for high-speed calculations, cloud computing, and key national projects and research.

    “The supercomputer can help reduce operational costs and improve the efficiency of local companies,” said Zhang Haizhong, leading engineer at the center.

    The National Supercomputing Center, which was established in 2009 and cost 800 million yuan (US$127 million), was the key science and technological facility in Guangdong and the largest investment in science and technology in Shenzhen.

    Shenzhen was one of the five cities in China selected by the National Development and Reform Commission to pilot cloud computing, according to a plaque presented at the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center yesterday.

    Other four cities are Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Wuxi.

    A total of 21 cities including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing were also selected to pilot e-commerce.

    Shenzhen Mayor Xu Qin said the production volume of the new-generation technological industry would be 1 trillion yuan by the end of 2015.

    Background 

    THERE are four supercomputing centers in China in Tianjin, Shenzhen, Changsha and Jinan.

    Tianhe-1A, the first petaflop computer in China which was installed in Tianjin, has been providing cloud computing for exploration, aircraft simulation, biomedicine, cartoon design and financial risk analysis.

    High performance computers were also adopted in Changsha designed to operate at 1 petaflop per second.

    The National Supercomputing Center in Jinan was inaugurated last month. It is the first petaflop computing center in China to adopt domestic CPU and systems software.

    (Han Ximin)