Dawning

Dawning Information Industry (Shuguang, 曙光) is a supercomputer manufacturer in the People's Republic of China. Its Dawning 4000A and Dawning 5000A clusters were both ranked tenth in June 2004 and November 2008 TOP500 lists respectively. Dawning has manufactured some of the fastest supercomputers in the world including Nebulae, the second fastest computer in the June 2010 TOP500 list.

The very first member of Dawning family is Dawning No.1 (Shuguang Yihao, 曙光一号), which received state certification in October 1993. This supercomputer achieved 640 million FLOPS and utilizes Motorola 88100 CPUs (4 total) and 88200 CPUs (8 total), and over 20 were built. The operating system is UNIX V.

Originally named as Dawning No.2 (Shuguang Erhao, 曙光二号) but subsequently renamed as Dawning 1000, this is the second generation of the family, and received state certification on May 11, 1995. This is the first Chinese built supercomputer that is capable of 1 billion FLOPS. This series of the Dawning family consists of the Dawning 1000A and 1000L.

The third member of the Dawning family is Dawning 2000, which passed state certification on January 28, 2000. The number of CPUs used was greatly increased to 164 in comparison to older models, and like earlier models, the operating system is UNIX. This series consisted of the Dawning 2000-I and II.

The fourth member of the Dawning family is Dawning 3000, which passed state certification on March 9, 2001. The number of CPU increased to 280, and the system consists of ten 2-meter tall racks, weighing 5 tons total. Power consumption is 25 kW, and one of the tasks it was used for was the part of human genome mapping that China was responsible for.

The fifth member of the Dawning family, Dawning 4000A, debuted as one of the top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world, on the TOP500 list, capable of 806.1 billion FLOPS. The system, at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center, utilizes over 2,560 AMD Opteron processors, and can reach speeds of 8 teraflops.

The newest member of the Dawning family is Dawning 5000A. It integrated 7,680 1.9 GHz AMD Opteron Quad-core processors, resulting in 30,720 cores, and Infiniband interconnecting network. Dawning 5000A occupies an area of 75 square meters and the power consumption is 700 kW. The general designer is Dr. Sun Ninghui (孙凝晖) and the unit price of Dawning 5000A is less than 100 million RMBY (~15 million USD). The supercomputer is capable of 180 teraflops and received state certification in June 2008. Ranked 10th in the November 2008 TOP500 list, it's also the largest system at that time, using Windows HPC Server 2008 for this benchmark. This system is also installed at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center and running with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.

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