14 DAY TRIAL // After snagging the title of the world's most powerful supercomputer, China has now turned its attention towards the development of a new HPC system that will be powered by processors designed and built inside the country's boundaries. The new system is expected to go live by the end of 2011.
The supercomputer will be called Dawning 6000 and was jointly developed by the Institute of Computing Technology and the Dawning Information Industry Company (DIIC).
“Our information industry was using foreign technology. However, just like a country's industry cannot always depend on foreign steel and oil, China's information industry needs its own CPU (central processing unit),” said National People's Congress Deputy Hu Weiwu.
According to the People's Daily Online publication, when finalized, the system should have a computing speed of more than 1,000 trillion operations a second, which equals to one petaflop.
To power the system, researchers will use nearly 10,000 Chinese-developed Loongson microchips.
Although no details about the specifications or the performances of these CPUs have been disclosed, Loongson processors use an MIPS-compatible architecture and the third version of the chips can pack up to eight processing cores, DDR3 DRAM support and range in speed between 1.0 and 1.2GHz.
“It still needs another decade before China-made chips meet the needs of the domestic market.
Hopefully after two decades, we will be able to sell our China-made CPUs to the US just like we are selling clothes and shoes,” said Hu.
Right now, China holds the record for the world's fastest supercomputer with the Tianhe-1A that uses a proprietary Chinese interconnect, 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs as well as 14,336 Intel Xeon X5670 CPUs and has a consistent speed of 2.5 petaflops and a theoretical peak of 4.7 petaflops. (via ZDNet)