Features:

CHINESE SUPERCOMPUTER MAY RANK AMONG FASTEST COMPUTERS

Chinese company Dawning Information Industry is building a new supercomputer, the Dawning 4000A, and expects the new system to rank among the fastest machines on Earth. The machine, to be used by Chinese research institutes and corporations, will run on over 2,000 AMD Opteron processors.

Researchers expect the system to rank among the top 15 on the most recent list of the 500 fastest computers, which will be released on June 22.

The Dawning 4000A is predicted to reach processing speeds of 10 teraflops, or 10 trillion calculations per second. Though there will be some competition with new list additions, only three systems currently surpass that speed.

The United States, along with other strong HPC leaders, has endeavored to deter the export of supercomputing technology that could potentially be used for nuclear weapon proliferation.

However, the new, relatively inexpensive idea to network series of low-end Linux systems into a high-performance clusters has opened up supercomputing avenues to a broad range of companies and institutes. This new idea has greatly affected the Top500 list, which is updated twice a year. The newest list will be unveiled at the International Supercomputer Conference, ISC2004 on June 22.

Though NEC's Earth Simulator is in its second year leading the list, Cray's Red Storm computer at Sandia National Labs could rise to the top with an expected speed of 40 teraflops. Red Storm is hoped to make the list by November.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's newest system, Thunder, will most likely make the June 22 list with a speed of 19.9 teraflops.

In addition, Linux Networx' Lightning at Los Alamos National Laboratory will potentially surpass 10 teraflops, making it another likely candidate for the Top500 list.

Cray is building a system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that expected to reach 50 teraflops. Yet IBM hopes to create the fastest computer in the world by 2005 with Blue Gene/L, a more standard cluster at Livermore lab. It is hoped the machine will reach 360 teraflops by next year.