Dawning said in Beijing that it would cooperate with the National Research Center for Intelligent Computing System and US semiconductor giant Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to develop a Red Grid program.

The product will be named the Dawning 4000A and will have a peak speed of 10,000 giga-floating point operations per second (Gflops), slower than only those setups in the Earth Simulator Centre in Japan and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States.

The previous high ranking for a Chinese company on the world's Top 500 Supercomputer chart was 43rd, garnered by the Legend Group last year.

"The Red Grid program marked a milestone in China's development in high-performance computing," said Shi Dinghuan, secretary general of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The Dawning 4000A will adopt cluster computing technology by integrating a collection of computers to cooperatively work as a single computing source.

A supercomputer made with cluster computing technology only costs about one-quarter of those with vector or mainframe technologies, according to Li Guojie, an academic of the Chinese Academy of Science.

The supercomputer will have more than 2,000 AMD Opteron processors.

This is the first time that a Chinese supercomputer maker uses AMD's Opteron processors, and previously the chips by AMD's arch-rival Intel are the most favored choice.

Dawning President Li Jun said the high-performance and good compatibility between 32-bit and 64-bit computing by Opteron was a major factor in cooperating with AMD.

However, he said that all the software, main boards and stability designs are all invented by the Chinese.

The design of the Dawning 4000A has been completed and the finished product will be delivered to customers in June.

The supercomputer will be endorsed by weather forecasts, oil exploration, research organizations and other sectors.

(China Daily July 23, 2003)