China as a potential HPCN market for Europe

London, 15-06-1997 An EU-China HPCN Initiative has been launched last year managed by the the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). The initiative is sponsored and funded by the European Commission, the Chinese government and private companies from Europe and China. It has been set-up to foster business and trade between China and Europe in this high technology sector. It is an industrial activity rather than research and according to the organisers over 60 companies expressed interest including many SMEs.

With a population of 1.2 Billion, China has one of the largest economies in the world. At a growth rate of 13% in 1995/96 its GDP will almost double by year 2000. The HPCN market in China is in its infancy. For example only 20% of the population have a telephone. The potential for installing complete networking infrastructures is there waiting for an injection of capital and knowhow. The story is similar in the potential for selling both hardware and software.

Current Chinese thinking is to facilitate this by joint ventures with Western and Japanese companies. China produced its own SMP and MPP systems in the 1990s. These are similar in concept to those in the West. Small clusters of processors for SMP architecture and nodes with at least 32-processors for their MPP systems. The MPPs are made using Motorola chips produced in China.

The current home grown MPP is the Dawning-1000 series. Based on a Motorola chip the smallest system consists of 32 computing processing units, 2 service units and 2 I/O units and 1GByte of memory. It has a peak performance of 2.56Gflops. Already new systems are being planned expecting to reach a Teraflops machine by the year 2000. The system runs Express, PVM, MPI, P4 and a local implementation of NX. It supports C, C++ and Fortran plus several parallelising, monitoring and analysing tools.

Over 1000 machines have been sold in 1996 and these are used in over 70 scientific and commercial application fields.

For further details contact: ERCIM .

Chris Lazou