China to build more supercomputers with homegrown chips

Baku. 23 January. REPORT.AZ/ China is planning more supercomputers with homegrown chips in order to meet government demands.

Report informs citing the foreign media, this was stated by a Chinese researcher involved in the country's high performance computing.

Last month, China's National Supercomputer Center in Jinan unveiled the Sunway BlueLight, the country's first supercomputer based entirely on domestically- developed microprocessors. The Sunway BlueLight has a sustained performance of 0.79 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second) when measured with the Linpack benchmark, which could place it at number 13 in the world's top 500 supercomputing list.

Over the next five years, China is expected to develop more supercomputers using homegrown chips, said Pan Jingshan, an assistant director at the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan. In 2006, government authorities outlined the country's future scientific development plans, which called for research in petaflop supercomputers built with "new foundational concepts".

Part of the center's goal in building the supercomputer was to raise China's technological competitiveness, Pan said. "Building supercomputers is the result from China and the local government's requirements. There definitely will appear more supercomputers using domestic CPUs," he said.

In comparison, Intel's Core i7-900 chip series use a 32 nanometer design process, giving it four times the number of transistors, he said.