Chinese scientists announced Saturday they have developed a world-class powerful computer superserver, known as Superserver Dawning 3000.
Fan Jianping, deputy director of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), said the state-of-the-art product has great scientific value and its domestic market potential is huge.
The product may be used by various centers for computing, network, information, liquidation, settlement, billing, data, and E-commerce.
It is also ideal for modeling and calculation in such industries as oil prospecting, weather forecast, aviation and space and vehicle design, earthquake forecast and monitor, environmental protection, finance and securities, biological information processing, network information and computing for basic science research.
With a peak floating speed of 403.2 billion times per second, the system also has a designed storage capacity of up to 16.8 gigabits (GB) of data by its EMI memory, and 3,630 gigabits by its magnetic disks, it said.
A group of experts organized by the CAS to evaluate the product said the superserver is on the par with the world's advanced level technologically. They said its cluster operating system and parallel programming environment are leading the world.
Fan said using only one-sixteenth of the server, Internet service providers are capable of handling 8 billion hits on web pages, or 140 million emails.
The product is especially competitive in terms of price and performance compared with similar overseas products, said Fan.
China announced last year it had developed a high-performance computer, Shenwei, with a peak floating speed of about 380 billion times per second, making China the third country in the world capable of producing such fast computers after the United States and Japan.
But the function of Shenwei is mainly defined to computing and not for information processing or network information service, he said.
Founded in 1956 as the country's first academic institute of computer technology, the CAS produced the country's first computer and has become the country's top research and development center of high-performance computers.
(Xinhua 02/18/2001)
