China creates homegrown supercomputer server

BEIJING: Measuring about 30 metres when laid end to end, the server is composed of 644 Intel microprocessors and has 644 gigabytes of random access memory (RAM) with storage capacity of 100 terabytes, said Sun Ninghui, a director at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"It is a milestone for China's super-server industry," Sun, an engineer who helped develop the server, told a news conference.

But one of global computer giant IBM's super servers in 2002 was made up of 1,920 microprocessors with a corresponding faster speed, compared with Dawning's 644.

Produced by computer hardware vendor Dawning Information Industry Co Ltd, the server has a computing speed of three Tera Floating Operations per Second (TFLOPS), about three times the speed of Legend Holdings Ltd's supercomputer.

At least one super computer server has been sold to the government, possibly for military or aeronautic use, Dawning officials said, declining to say its sale price.

A computer analyst at an investment bank in Hong Kong said the super-server completed one more step in China's quest to build a domestic technology industry, but did not hit a research milestone.

"Making a super-server using other people's technology is nothing new," he said. "It's basically copying, like what Japan did in the 1960s and what Korea did in the 1970s and 1980s." China's super-servers are likely to retail at between $10 million and $20 million, he said.