China's supercomputer has realized great leap both in technology and application as the super server Dawning4000A with a peak performance of 11 trillion floating point operations per second (TFlops) passed appraisal on June 29.

The supercomputer also becomes China's most advanced commercial supercomputer. After the United States, Japan, China becomes the third country to conquer the development and application of 10-TFlops supercomputer.

Dawning4000A stands at the tenth, the best China has ever done with international recognition, at the global high-performance computer rankings published on June 22.

Dawning4000A super server was jointly developed by the Institute of Computing Technology under Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China Dawning Information Industry Company and Shanghai Super Calculation Center.

It is a significant achievement of the 863 Plan set by the Ministry of Science and Technology, also for the knowledge innovation project of  CAS and Shanghai's information construction. The project was initiated in 2001 and system design was completed in 2003.

Dawning4000A realized for home-made super server great breakthrough in core technologies such as the design of main board. It conquered a series of key technologies in "large computer group" computing and can be on a par with those state-of-the-art in terms of function-to-price ratio and functional consumption.

The completed Dawning4000A will be set in Shanghai Super Computing Center as the biggest main node of China's national grid to provide great amount of information processing, information development services and scientific high-performance computing for eastern regions.

Dawning4000A is able to complete in 20 seconds the real-time evaluation on power security for the power web composed of for 10,000 grids of as high as 5,000-KW and 220,000-V sub-stations.

And it can complete the computing of ten-year-long 200-odd stock indexes of over 1,000 stock exchange information; it also can complete four times 36-hour weather forecast for areas around China, most parts of north China, areas around Beijing, and for Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, in terms of wind direction, speed, moisture, temperature, accurate even within one kilometer or, in other words, accuracy available on every Olympic venue.

To date, Dawning4000A has succeeded in over 30 applications such as weather forecast, data processing on oil and earthquake, nuclear power development and application, computing fluid mechanics, analysis on gene and protein, and material science. It shows high performance in scientific computing, dealing with affairs and information service.

Shanghai Super Computing Center runs six important commercial application software on Dawning4000A and gains good application function which can greatly improve the ability in design in manufacturing industries such as auto, aircraft and ship.

(People's Daily July 1, 2004)