China flexes its muscles in supercomputers

Mainland China has strengthened its hold as the world's second-largest maker and user of high-performance computing servers, nearly 11 years since the market launched its first commercial supercomputer.

The market's appetite for more powerful computing infrastructure took the spotlight last week, when the latest list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers ranked the Chinese-developed Tianhe-2 system at No1.

Thomas Zhou, the senior research manager for enterprise systems and software at IDC China, said: "The largest users on the mainland are the universities and national laboratories as well as the consumer electronics, manufacturing, and oil and gas industries."

International Business Machines, Hewlett-Packard and Dell - the top three suppliers of high-performance computing servers worldwide - are also the leading source of these machines on the mainland.

Supercomputers are traditionally used for complicated, compute-intense tasks like mapping the human genome and nuclear blast simulation. It is also widely adopted in commercial research, from creating video games and energy exploration to solving aeronautic problems.

Sugon, the Beijing-based company formerly known as Dawning Information Industry, is the biggest domestic manufacturer of supercomputers. It is followed by Inspur, a major information-technology systems supplier headquartered in Shandong province, and the government-run National University of Defence Technology (NUDT) in Hunan province.