Scientists at China’s Qinghua University in Beijing claim to have developed a new high-performance cluster computer system, which is rated at 16 BOPS (billions of operations per second) but, the researchers claim, will cost one tenth of the price of an equivalent IBM machine.
Exactly what kind of IBM machine the Qinghua Probe 108 is being compared to is unclear. Xinhua, China’s official news agency, gave no details of the machine’s architecture or software, nor did it define what is meant by BOPS. However, a prototype machine has been set to work at weather forecasting by the Beijing Meteorological Station and other likely applications are said to include oil prospecting, genetic engineering and nuclear weapons development. This suggests the Probe may be some kind of massively parallel supercomputer platform.
Electronics and computer manufacturer Qinhua Tongfang Group worked with the academics to built the prototype, and according Xinhua, the company is set to enter full commercial production.
Earlier last week, the Communications Command College of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) called for legislation to mandate that information systems related to both national security and civilian planning to be produced domestically so that all encoding equipment and calculations are developed at home.
