APPLICATIONS

The fastest super computer in China - Dawning4000A, which operates at a speed of 11 Tflops, was officially started at Shanghai Supercomputer Center (SSC) on Monday. It signifies not only that China has become the third country after the US, Japan, which has surmounted the development and application of computers with a speed of 10 Tflops, but also that the largest main grid node in China has launched into operation and a "Three Gorges Dam" is being constructed in the information technology area. At the launching ceremony Chen Liangyu, member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Party Secretary of the Shanghai Party Committee, started the Dawning4000A system and the first group of 11 application tasks were submitted to the system. As the southern main node of the national grid Dawning4000A also successfully connected with China's national grid for the first time to provide computing services to users far in Beijing. With the development of science and technology and economy high-performance computer level is increasingly become an important indicator of a country's R&D strength. In order to meet the growing demand for high-performance computing in Shanghai, east China and even the whole country, the fully loaded SSC started in 2003 to plan the second-phase expansion project - one of the main projects of Shanghai information port. The 10 Tflops computer - Dawning4000A was favorably viewed and became the main content of the second-phase expansion project. Under the joint efforts by the Institute of Computer Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dawning Corporation and Shanghai Supercomputer Center, Dawning4000A was developed in June and ranked 10th on the list of world's top high-performance computers released that month. In August installation of the system was completed in Shanghai and in September it entered test operation phase. During the test operation phase as the largest main node in China's national grid and the information network center that provides services for east China and even the whole country, the SSC added commercialized application software worth of tens of millions of yuan and successfully conducted a series of tests with high-performance computer applications.