The Honk Kong Government's plans to cut its higher education budget have dampened prospects for the territory's leading supercomputing initiative, at the University of Hong Kong (HKU).
The cuts planned for next year could make it difficult for local ?universities to support research projects by staff and students that require high-performance computing.
HKU's computer centre director, Nam Ng, said: 'We are concerned because the cuts would affect us just like any department in the university.'
The planned cuts have come as HKU's new high-performance computing system has received recognition as Hong Kong's fastest supercomputer to date.
The machine - made up of a cluster of 128 IBM eServer x335 servers with 256 2.8-gigahertz Pentium 4 Xeon processors - was ranked No 240 among the world's top 500 supercomputers announced last November. Hong Kong had three high-performance systems in the latest top 500 list, down from four in June.
Researchers at the Universities of Mannheim in Germany and Tennessee in the United States release their top 500 supercomputer list twice a year.
Rankings are based on the Linpack Benchmark, a yardstick of performance that measures processor speed and scalability.
