China Daily: we're number 7! Maybe. In November. Ish.

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This from China Daily today

Dawning 5000A, with a capability of 160 trillions of computing operations per second, is signed to be installed in the Shanghai Supercomputer Center (SSC) which specializes in super computing outsourcing services for daunting jobs such as genome mapping, quake appraisal, precise weather forecast, mining survey and huge stock exchange data.

Looks like the Chinese aren’t exactly happy with their chip supplier though

Nie Hua, vice president of Dawning Information Industry Co., said here Wednesday in an interview with Xinhua, “The delay in the delivery of AMD Barcelona quad-cores chips made us miss the latest rankings.”

Lot of that going around this year. But, the system isn’t expected to come online until November, which might push it out past that list, too.

There is some interesting stuff about the backstory on the chips

Previous industry analysis predicted Dawning might for the first time use the home-grown Godson chips in super servers, which breaks the hold of Intel and AMD in the high-end server CPU market. Godson chips were developed by a research team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), which also holds the Dawning Company.

Nie explained why Godson chips were not used: “Our client (the SSC) required the major functions of the system should be accomplished in Microsoft Windows operating system whereas Godson chips primarily run the competing Linux operating system.”

Hmmm, Godson. And Windows.

Dawning is not a stranger to TOP500. A Dawning 4000A was ranked the tenth fastest in the world in June 2004.

Chinese computing scientists built in 1995 the country’s first supercomputer, which only reached the major technical standards of what US companies produced eight years before. China is now getting closer to the US and is second in Asia, as Japan is losing ground.

More interesting stuff in the article, I recommend a read. MF over at HPCwire also has a blog post on the decision to abandon the Godson, with more info on that chip development effort.

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