high-performance computing


China’s long march continues


Already in the top three supercomputer vendors worldwide, Chinese companies have wider ambitions still, as Tom Wilkie reports


Top500? HP is the leader with a 31 per cent share; Cray is number two with just under 14 per cent. So far, so unsurprising. But what has been little remarked upon is that in third place – with 49 systems, or 9.8 per cent of the Top500 list – is the Chinese vendor, Sugon. And both Sugon and Inspur, the other


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main Chinese vendor, have their sights set on expanding still further, with trade missions to Europe and partnerships and subsidiaries in both Europe and the USA, as senior executives of both companies explained in interviews with Scientific Computing World at SC15. A lot has happened since Scientific Computing World’s August/September issue which reported on developmental efforts in HPC in articles including; ‘China: not one but two 100 Petaflop machines within a year?’, ‘An open invitation to work on the world’s fastest computer’ and ‘Chinese Government kicks commercial companies overseas’. Inspur has 15 systems in the Top500 – about


three per cent – which puts it in position eight, ahead of both Fujitsu and Dell. Lenovo, which took over IBM’s x86 business is accounted for rather eccentrically in the current list, with nine systems listed as IBM/Lenovo and, separately, five systems under the heading Lenovo/IBM. Huawei has two systems in the Top500. Of course, the rankings differ somewhat if the share of total performance is considered rather than number of systems, but Sugon and Inspur are still among the top ten vendors globally, when measured by performance.


European expansion Sugon has just completed a trade mission to the UK, according to Lei (Joshua) Wang, the company’s vice president. ‘We will base our first office for Western Europe in the UK,’ he said, ‘and we have chosen London for our European HQ. End-users understand our


www.scientific-computing.com l


ho are the world’s most important vendors of supercomputers, at least as measured by the number of systems they have in the


Inspur worked on the world’s fastest supercomputer, Tianhe-2, but its business is broadly based across many sectors other than HPC


strategy and local partners are keen to provide services, including maintenance and aſter-sales support.’ Most UK customers are expected to be in universities or research centres in the first instance, he said. Sugon has been involved in planning the


layout of China’s national cloud computing ‘blue map’ and has built up dozens of city cloud computing centres, including those in Chengdu, Wuxi, Nanjing, and Baotou. It is therefore only natural that Wang should express Sugon’s interest in the ‘Smart City’ project being developed for Milton Keynes in the UK. Central to the ‘MK:Smart’ project is the creation of a state-of-the-art ‘MK Data Hub’ to acquire and manage vast amounts of data relevant to city systems from many data sources. Tese will include data about energy and water consumption, transport, data acquired through satellite technology, social and economic datasets, and crowdsourced data from social media or specialised apps. Te opportunities for Sugon are obvious.


@scwmagazine Western Europe may well be approached


through a partnership with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. In 2014, the Alcatel-Lucent Group, on the brink of bankruptcy, sold an 85 per cent stake in its enterprise division to China


SUGON AND INSPUR ARE AMONG THE TOP TEN VENDORS GLOBALLY


Huaxin Post and Telecommunication Economy Development Centre for 202 million euros (US$255.58 million). Te company, which has been incorporated in France and is no longer part of the Alcatel-Lucent Group, is looking to grow through joint ventures, particularly, in soſtware-defined networking and datacentre technologies. According to Sugon’s Joshua Wang, its technology is currently HP but, following the acquisition by Huaxin it is looking for different suppliers and so Sugon will set up a French centre there too.


DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016 21


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National University of Defence Technology


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