Big Red doubles its hard drives
China is on course to become one of the world's top makers and users of supercomputers, with systems geared for growing domestic industries and international markets.
After nearly doubling the number of its high-performance systems in the latest global ranking of the 500 fastest supercomputers, China had shown that it could start to challenge supercomputer powerhouses United States and Japan, industry experts said.
'I think that could happen very soon. My sense is that there are very low barriers to export this technology,' said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer sciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also one of three researchers who have compiled the top 500 supercomputers list twice a year since 1993.
The world's toughest computing problems are tackled on bulky supercomputers, used for such complex tasks as meteorological modelling, human-genome mapping and nuclear-blast simulation.
The new top 500 list, released this month, showed that the number of high-performance systems in China rose to 17 from nine a year ago.
Twelve of the mainland-based supercomputers were deployed this year, signifying fresh demand for systems with intensive computing capabilities by both the government and large Chinese firms.
David Keyes, professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University, said: 'As China develops domestic expertise in supercomputing, the country will excel in many areas, including engineering, science, technology, entertainment, health care, defence and resource management.
'If China also becomes an exporter of supercomputers, there will be pressure on US and Japanese firms since the world market for supercomputers is not yet large.'
Mainland manufacturers, such as Lenovo Group and Dawning Information Industry, are expected to be able to assemble these computers at competitive prices because they use industry-standard, commodity components like semiconductors and networking gear.
'It has been demonstrated for over a decade that commodity components can be assembled to produce very useful, general-purpose supercomputers. This is significant since it places these supercomputers beyond the limits of export control,' Mr Keyes said.
Lenovo last year became the first Chinese company to build commercial supercomputers for the mainland, with its DeepComp systems. Yang Yuanxing, Lenovo vice-chairman and chief executive, vowed to 'end the monopoly of foreign products in China's high-performance computer market'.
Dawning was the first Asian manufacturer outside of Japan to make a supercomputer that ranked as one of the world's 10 fastest, with its Dawning 4000A achieving that feat in June.
Mr Simon said China had the resources to deliver a large number of important supercomputers within the next few years and become 'a significant player in high-performance computing'.
In Asia, China is still behind Japan, which has 30 systems in the new top 500. Hong Kong has one machine and Taiwan has two systems among the 87 supercomputers in Asia that made the list.
Europe has 127 systems in the top 500.
There has been a major shuffle in the latest top 10 ranking, as IBM's new BlueGene/L system in the US Department of Energy became the new industry leader, with a record performance of 70.72 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second).
After holding the No1 position since 2002, Japan's NEC Earth Simulator in Yokohama dropped to No3 behind the Columbia system built by SGI for a Nasa laboratory.
