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China Developing 100 teraflops Supercomputer?
As reported in People's Daily, the Dawning Company in China is carrying out research on a supercomputing system with a peak calculation speed exceeding 100 TFlop/s (“teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second). The program may be jointly carried out by the National Research Center for Intelligent Computing systems (NCIC) and the Dawing Company. Sources say the 100 teraflops supercomputer may adopt China-developed Longxin processor. But a person with the marketing department of Dawning says, "There is little possibility for the supercomputer to adopt Longxin." If the development of the 100 TFlop/s supercomputer succeeds, it may make the top three in the next TOP 500 ranking this November. Details about research of the 100 teraflops supercomputer will hopefully be revealed at a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of China's development of high performance computer on July 12, said president of Dawning Li Jun. The US and Japan have already announced starting development of 100 teraflops supercomputers, and IBM announced success in developing the supercomputer. China will become the 2nd country possessing 100 TFlop/s supercomputer should the program succeed. On the latest release of the TOP500 list, the Number 1 position was again claimed by the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. BlueGene/L also occupied the No. 1 position on the last TOP500 list issued in November 2004. However, the system was doubled in size during the last six months and reached a new record Linpack benchmark performance of 136.8 TFlop/s. This system, once completed, will again be doubled in size and is expected to remain the #1 Supercomputer in the world for the next few editions of the TOP500 list. Supercomputing is an indicator of a country's competitiveness strength. The world ranking of this year shows China has 19 supercomputers among the world top 500, accounting for 3.8 percent. China is only behind the US, Germany, the UK and Japan on the ranking, and is the country with the fastest growth in supercomputing market in Asia.