INTERCONNECTS

Shi Dinghuan, spokesman of the Ministry of Science and Technology, announced recently that Chinese scientists have produced a commercialized version of a high performance server - the Lenovo DeepComp 6800. They claim it could be used for a precise 36-hour weather forecast on a specific area with just 30 minutes of computing work. The server project was jointly funded by the ministry and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and will be equipped with a trunk node in the proposed national grid. DeepComp 6800 is reported to be able to perform 5.324 trillion floating-point operations per second. Its practical running speed, measured by Linpack benchmark reaches 4.183 trillion per second. Qian Depei, coordinator for the national high-tech research and development project on high-performance computers and related software, said building the national grid is their main target in achieving breakthroughs in the coming couple of years. The grid combines several high-performance servers, large-scale databases, expensive lab equipment, communication equipment and others into a giant network, which supports nationwide, or even worldwide, scientific research.