With Blue Gene/L, IBM maintained its No. 1 position in the latest TOP500 supercomputer list released on June 22, 2005. The rankings are made twice a year. IBM also took up half of the seats in both the top ten and the top 500. Experts pointed out, however, IBM's lead is only depending on the progress of the Blue Gene serial computers and it does not bring any change to the overall situtation of the R&D of supercomputers in the world. China has joined the world front rankings in R&D and manufacturing.

After taking the first place with 70.72 TFlops/s ("teraflops" or trillions of calculations per second), IBM's Blue Gene/L made much headway in its performance and kept the crown with 136.8 TFlop/s followed by Blue Gene Watson also from IBM with a performance of 91.2 TFlops/s.

Sun Ninghui, director of the National Research Center for Intelligent Computer Systems under the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), said that currently there are mainly two kinds of R&D strategy: first is to seek stronger performance of single processing unit, and second is to apply more processing units. Since the 1990s, the former strategy dominated, especially rapid development of massive parallel processing (MPP). Sun said, the greatly improved performance of the serial supercomputers of Blue Gene mainly depends the progress made in MPP yet their application is relatively limited and the R&D level was not enhanced fundamentally.

"Dawning 4000A" developed by China's Dawning Computer Company once made it into the top ten. However, it later fell to the 17th and to 31st this time. The organizer specially mentioned in its report that China has 19 supercomputers into the top 500, two more from the previous rankings, accounting for 3.8 percent of the total supercomputers, next to only the United States, Germany and Britain, which is a "highlight".

Sun analyzed that China's R&D of supercomputers has made steady development as a result of constantly enhanced overall national strength and rapid progress in its R&D ability. In particular, in recent years, the country's demand for technologies and innovation continued to grow and, as an important instrument in scientific research, supercomputers has expanded in their application. However, Sun stressed, although China has been close to other powers in terms of R&D, it lags far behind in terms of application.

Supercomputer is an embodiment of a country's strength in scientific research. It has been a more and more competitive for hi-tech industries to conduct R&D in supercomputers with lower energy consumption, better performance and smaller cubage. Chinese supercomputer companies led by Dawning Computer Company, has been making breakthroughs in the past ten years with products widely applied in energy, space technology and education etc. They not only broke the technological monopoly by developed countries but also saved huge capital for the country.

By People's Daily Online