Dawning 5000A, a China-made supercomputer, is expected to be installed in Shanghai in April, its developer said Thursday.

The supercomputer, with a peak capability of more than 200 trillion FLOPS (Floating-point operations per second), will be used for information processing and fundamental scientific research at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center (SSC), said Li Jun, president of Tianjin-based Dawning Information Industry Co.

The SSC, founded in 2000, is a high-performance public computation platform.

Dawning 5000A will help with weather forecasting, construction of seabed tunnels, environmental protection, large passenger aircraft production and earthquake predictions, according to the SSC.

Dawning 5000A covers a floor space of 75 square meters and consumes 700 kilowatts per hour. It was paid for by the Ministry of Science and Technology and Shanghai Municipal Government.

Even with expensive imported AMD chips, Dawning 5000A cost only200 million yuan (29 million U.S. dollars). That price is significantly lower than what the U.S. Department of Energy spent on IBM "Roadrunner," which cost 100 million U.S. dollars.

Chinese computing scientists built the country's first supercomputer in 1995.

(Xinhua News Agency January 2, 2009)