Chinese Supercomputer Is Ranked World’s Second-Fastest, Challenging U.S. Dominance

A Chinese supercomputer has been ranked as the world’s second-fastest machine, surpassing European and Japanese systems and underscoring China’s aggressive commitment to science and technology.

The Dawning Nebulae, based at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, has achieved a sustained computing speed of 1.27 petaflops — the equivalent of one thousand trillion mathematical operations a second — in the latest semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest 500 computers.

The newest ranking was made public on Monday at the International Supercomputer Conference in Hamburg, Germany. Supercomputers are used for scientific and engineering problems as diverse as climate simulation and automotive design.

The Chinese machine is actually now ranked as the world’s fastest in terms of theoretical peak performance, but that is considered a less significant measure than the actual computing speed achieved on a standardized computing test.


超級電腦曙光「星雲」

中國第一部實測性能超千萬億次的超級電腦曙光「星雲」目前正在深圳超算中心安裝，將於今年7月份正式運行。

曙光「星雲」由坐落在天津濱海高新技術產業開發區內的曙光公司天津產業基地研製生產，2010年6月1日正式對外發表，是中國第一部、世界第三台實測雙精度浮點計算超過千萬億次的超級電腦。在2010年11月17日發布的第36屆全球超級電腦500強排名中，名列第三位。

曙光公司總裁歷軍表示，「星雲」是面向未來「雲計算」環境設計的超級電腦系統，強調系統的均衡設計和資源動態調度能力，將成為中國新一代超級雲計算中心建設的主力機種。

據曙光公司介紹，按照原計劃，「星雲」應該在2010年11月中旬交付深圳超算中心投入商業應用，但由於深圳的機房工程原因，再加上氣候因素影響，「星雲」交付時間一再被推遲。經過與深圳方面溝通，「星雲」暫時在天津「異地」為深圳超算中心工作。由於目前安裝條件已具備，今年5月，「星雲」運抵深圳超算中心，並開始安裝和調試。

國家超級計算深圳中心是國家在深圳佈局建設的第一個，也是深圳建市以來單個投資額最大的重大科技基礎項目。

歷軍表示，「星雲」在深圳超算中心運行後，將為深圳提高信息產業綜合實力、政府服務職能信息化水準，增強城市持續創新能力和核心競爭力提供強大的技術支撐。同時，對於推動深圳產業轉型、將深圳打造成為中國乃至亞太地區雲計算發展的領先城市也同樣有著深遠影響。

據了解，借助於「星雲」的國家超級計算深圳中心將立足深圳，服務華南，面向港、澳、台及東南亞，將建成四大平台：一是科技服務平台，為氣象、金融等行業提供公共信息服務；二是產業創新平台，為企業提供高性能計算和數據處理解決方案；三是科技研發平台，為高性能計算應用軟件研發提供支撐；四是人才聚集平台，支持華南地區進行人才培養、技術交流與國際合作等活動。

Renovation of Homepage (www.hkceedu.org)

We are pleased to inform that the renovation of our Homepage (http://www.hkceedu.org/) was finished. This will link up with our parent website (http://www.tdpedu.org/) of TD Professional Education Group Limited.

International ICT Expo - The Official Magazine with CDCDP

IPv4 addresses have been used up

The current crop of Internet addresses could start to disappear this week if a regional Internet registry makes one more request for two blocks of addresses.

APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre) is eligible to request two large blocks of IPv4 (Internet Protocol, Version 4) addresses, because users have been snapping up its existing stock quickly enough, according to Leo Vegoda, manager of number resources at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Because there are only seven of these large blocks left, that allocation to APNIC would activate a policy for the IANA to hand out the last five blocks to the five regional registries, Vegoda said.

Experts have been warning ISPs (Internet service providers) and enterprises for years that IPv4 addresses are destined to run out soon. Various technical fixes have staved off that day, but the assignment of those final blocks would leave the ultimate supply of those addresses tapped out. This would mark a milestone on the path to an Internet based totally on the latest protocol, IPv6.

IPv6 has a much larger address space, which allows for an almost limitless number of unique addresses. The IANA allocates IPv6 addresses in a similar way to IPv4, except in much larger "/12" blocks, Vegoda said.

The expanded address space is expected to be most critical to users in quickly developing countries such as China and India, as well as for the many new mobile devices being used for Internet access. The transition to IPv6 will be gradual, but even an enterprise that has enough IPv4 addresses should start supporting IPv6 in order to reach the new end points that won't be able to get IPv4 addresses, Vegoda said. Otherwise, they eventually will need to go through devices on ISP networks that translate between the two protocols. Those could introduce delays, and possibly communication problems if they were incompatible with certain protocols, he said.

Google, Facebook, Cisco Systems, Verizon Business and other major vendors and service providers will take part in World IPv6 Day in June, a global test of the new protocol organized by the Internet Society. For 24 hours, the participating companies will run their public websites on both IPv4 and IPv6.


由「IPv4」向「IPv6」轉型是個巨大工程，除了所有終端用戶，都必須更換終端設備接入網際網路的路由器或調製解調器之外，所有網站和網際網路服務商，也都必須全面改造，提供適用於「IPv6」協議的終端設備入網「接口」。很多網站和網際網路服務商認為，這種改造太費「周折」，因而一直堅持使用基於「IPv4」協議的網絡接入標準。