China's Sunway BlueLight supercomputer, which
was built with domestically produced microprocessors and is capable of
performing around one thousand trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop,
has officially gone into operation at the National Supercomputing Centre in the
eastern China city of Jinan. The centre said Thursday that the computer was
installed in September 2011 and underwent a three-month-long trial operation
before going into official use, making China the third country in the world to
be capable of producing a supercomputer with domestically produced processors
after the United States and Japan.
The role of the Sunway BlueLight in promoting
scientific and economic development of Shandong province, of which Jinan is the
provincial capital, will be tapped, namely in fields of ocean utilization,
biopharmacy, industrial design, and financial risk prediction. Meanwhile,
the computer will serve as a node in China's national computing grid,
contributing to scientific and economic development of the whole country, the
NSCC said. As a product of a combination of high-density packaging and low
energy consumption technologies, the Sunway ranks among the world's leading
supercomputers in terms of comprehensive performance, according to the NSCC. The
Sunway BlueLight is about 74 percent as fast as the Jaguar Supercomputer in the
United States, which ranks the third fastest computer in the world, although
it's less power-hungry, Pan said. The Sunway's power consumption is as low as 1
megawatt, much lower than the Jaguar's 7 megawatts, thanks to its innovative use
of liquid cooling system, according to Pan.