December 2003 updates

Supercomputers, mobile phone chip, and an international award
By Huixin Ke in Beijing, China. December 2003

Two new supercomputers commissioned

The Legend Group announced on 9 December that it had successfully developed a supercomputer named Lenovo DeepComp 6800. It has an outstanding performance of 4.183 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFlops). The Chinese supercomputer is ranked 14th in the recently published rating of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. This ranking is highest ever achieved by Chinese computer builders. However, this achievement by the Legend Group was beaten a week later by another Chinese company, Dawning Information Industry Co Ltd, which also happens to be China's biggest high-performance computer maker, when it announced the commissioning of the Dawning 4000A which is estimated to rank only after the supercomputers at the Earth Simulator Center in Japan and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States. The Dawning 4000A has a peak speed of 10,000 giga-floating point operations per second (Gflops). The Lenovo DeepComp 6800 is equipped with a trunk node in the northern national grid, while the Dawning 4000A will be connected to the southern grid. More at http://news.xinhuanet.com/newscenter/2003-12/10/content_1222665.htm

China to make its own cell phone chips

China will soon stop importing high-tech cell phone chips with a big breakthrough in the production 3G-multimedia cell phone chip at the Shanghai Tongji University. This was announced on 19 December. The locally developed chip marks an important milestone in China's cell phone production. More at http://news.xinhuanet.com/it/2003-12/19/content_1240558.htm http://www.tongji.edu.cn/news/20031219174728.htm

WSIS award

China's Agricultural Expert System (863 program) was presented with the World Summit Award (WSA) for its effort in narrowing digital divide between agriculture and other industries during the World Summit on the Information Society held in Geneva from 10-12 December. More at http://news.xinhuanet.com/it/2003-12/11/content_1225945.htm

Second Internet conference

The second Internet Conference of China (ICC) was held in Beijing on 6 and 7 December. The theme of the conference was "See Internet in Perspective, Reintegrate Industry Chain".

E-government year

The second International E-government Conference was held in Shanghai, from 18–20 December. As a year-end meeting, this conference marked the end of China E-Government Year and provided a valuable platform for delegations to show their achievements and to exchange their experiences on e-government technique, services, and fieldwork. More at http://www.cnw.com.cn/news/article.asp?filename=n3121202.txt http://www.cnw.com.cn/news/article.asp?filename=n3121701.txt