Sunway BlueLight supercomputer in operation

The Chinese Sunway BlueLight supercomputer, which was built with domestically produced microprocessors and is capable of performing around one-thousand-trillion calculations per second, has officially gone into operation at the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in east China's city of Jinan, the center said Thursday.

The computer was installed in September 2011 and underwent a three-month-long trial operation period before going into official use, making China the third country in the world to be capable of producing a supercomputer with domestically produced processors after the United States and Japan.

Developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology, Sunway BlueLight marks a great technological leap for China's indigenous innovation in development and utilization of high-performance computers, according to the NSCC.

The role of Sunway BlueLight in promoting scientific and economic development of Shandong province, of which Jinan is the provincial capital, will be tapped, namely in fields of ocean utilization, biopharmacy, industrial design, and financial risk prediction.

Meanwhile, the computer will serve as a node in China's national computing grid, contributing to scientific and economic development of the whole country, the NSCC said.

A product that is a combination of high-density packaging and low energy consumption technologies, the supercomputer ranks among the world's leading supercomputers in terms of comprehensive performance, according to the NSCC.