Manufacturing

China unveiled its fastest supercomputer yesterday, which at its peak speed can do more than one quadrillion calculations per second, known as a petaflop.

The birth of the supercomputer, named "Tianhe", which means "Milky Way", makes China the second country, after the United States, to build a petaflop computer. This gigantic device can do as many calculations in one day as those done by an ordinary dual-core personal computer in 160 years, said Li Nan, director of the Tianhe Project Office under the National University of Defense Technology, developer of the supercomputer.

Tianhe, at a cost of 600 million yuan ($88 million), ranks first on China's Top 100 supercomputer list released in Changsha, capital of Hunan Province, with a theoretical peak performance of 1.206 petaflops and a Linpack performance of 560 teraflops.

The Linpack benchmark is used to measure the supercomputer's real performance in practical use.

The data has been submitted to the world Top 500 organization, which will release the new ranking list in November. According to the Top 500 list in June, Tianhe can be ranked the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world.

Supported by the national high-tech research and development program, also known as the 863 program, development of Tianhe has involved more than 200 computer experts who spent about two years in designing and producing the petaflop supercomputer, said Zhang Yulin, president of the defense university.

The supercomputer has many practical applications, and will be used in seismic data processing for oil exploration, bio-medical research, development of aerospace vehicles, long-term weather and climate forecasting, financial data analysis and pollution control in the Bohai Sea area, according to Li.

Tianhe, made up of 103 refrigerator-sized silver gray cabinets, occupies an area of nearly 1,000 sq m and weighs 155 tons, containing 6,144 Intel CPUs and 5,120 AMD GPUs, with a storage capacity of 1 PB.

"Tianhe can store four times of all the books housed in the National Library of China. If every one of China's 1.3 billion people takes a high-resolution digital photo, Tianhe can record all the photos," said Li Nan.

The giant machine, now housed in Changsha, will be installed in the National Supercomputing Center in north China's port city Tianjin at the end of this year. It will be made available for domestic and overseas users in 2010.

Dongfeng Motor Corp said recently that for the first nine months of the year, the company produced 1.302 million vehicles up 25.71 percent from a year earlier, and its total sales surged by 30.53 percent to 1.32 million, equal to the full year sales of 2008, Xinhua News reported yesterday.

At such a developing speed, the company is expected to break through its total 1.4 million sales target of 2009.

"Dongfeng sold 190,917 cars in September, up 76.90 percent from the same period of last year and 21.20 percent from last month, which is the best single month sales ever", according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

On Oct. 10, with its first 15 pure electric trucks rolling off the production line, Dongfeng became the first auto maker in China to pass both the hybrid and pure electric truck test. This is recognized as solid progress in promoting the commercialization of these vehicles. 　

An executive of Dongfeng also has revealed that its independent and joint-venture brands are working together to make the whole corporation develop smoothly and rapidly.

SAIC Motor, a Shanghai-listed subsidiary of leading Chinese automaker Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC), reported a 47 percent year-on-year growth in complete vehicle sales during the first nine months of this year, exceeding 1.94 million units.

September sales soared 90.7 percent from a year earlier to over 260,000 units.

SAIC Motor said passenger vehicle sales exceeded 150,000 units in September, while commercial vehicle sales surged by 91 percent year on year.

Shanghai GM, its joint venture with US-based General Motors, sold 71,566 complete vehicles in September. Sales in the first three quarters climbed 40.4 percent to 480,202 units.

In another joint venture, SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile posted sales of 100,635 units in September. Sales in the January-September period jumped 64.5 percent to 801,869 units.

To meet the challenge of increasing investment by global brands and fierce competition in the world's most robust car market, Chery Automobile Co, the largest independent Chinese carmaker, plans to build a 200,000-unit plant in northeastern port city of Dalian to make vehicles for both domestic and overseas markets.

Company spokesman Jin Yibo told China Daily that total investment in the Dalian plant, Chery's first domestic facility outside its home base in eastern city of Wuhu, would exceed

¥4 billion ($588 million) after initial investment of ¥2 billion.