Leading officials in the Chinese computing industry have called for more investment in domestic high technologies.
"We must develop our indigenous technologies in superservers, central processing units and optical and electronic units because developed countries prohibit the export of these technologies to China," Li Guojie, director of the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), said in an interview with Xinhua News Agency on Friday.
A decade ago, Chinese-made servers attracted few domestic or overseas buyers. To date, the most powerful Chinese superserver was listed by the US Department of Energy as the world's tenth fastest superserver.
Suma 4000A, developed by the ICT, has the highest computing speed of 11 trillion times per second and eight trillion times per second according to the Linpack Benchmark, which measures server performance.
Li and his team own 31 invention patents with Suma 4000A, which has never been seen in any Chinese-made servers.
China started research on its own superserver in the early 1980s and successfully developed the Milky Way I in 1983, with the highest computing performance of 100 million times per second. Financial allocation and personnel deployment to develop superservers reflected China's commitment to promoting indigenous high technologies.
In March 1986, optical physicist Wang Daheng and three other prominent scientists wrote a cosigned letter to the central leadership, requesting the promotion of strategic high technologies. This led to the development of a national hi-tech research and development program, nicknamed the "863 Program."
The "863 Program" focuses on biological, space, information, laser, automation, energy, new material and marine technologies development, choosing 20 subjects as priorities of research and development.
Xu Guanhua, Minister of Science and Technology, said, "Improving our innovation capability and developing technologies with our own intellectual property are the two main objectives of our hi-tech development strategy."
In the two decades after the launch of the "863 Program", Chinese scientists and technologists have sharpened their innovative tools in high-performance servers, central processing units, functional human genomes, bio-chips, cloning technologies, nano technologies and automation technologies.
Although huge leaps have been made in many fields of high technologies, China is still lagging far behind the developed world.
CAS President Lu Yongxiang said, "China has a blurred overall strategy for boosting high technologies.
"The state needs to invest much more in cultivating strategic high technologies and commercializing them," Lu said.
(Xinhua News Agency February 5, 2006)
