(JW Insights) May 24 -- China is building a national supercomputing internet platform to promote the interconnection and sharing of supercomputing resources and fill the computing power gap resulting from the increasing needs of applications such as artificial intelligence, Yicai Global reported on May 23.

Cao Zhennan, deputy head of the High Performance Computer Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Computing Technology, told Yicai Global that “The platform aims to solve the imbalance in China's computing power resources, enabling supercomputing to serve individuals, corporations, the government, and scientific researchers.”

China formally began to build the supercomputing internet platform last month, Cao said, adding that it is funded and operated by a consortium of 22 bodies, with more participants expected to join later. 

The platform can support major scientific research projects with computing power and it can also fulfill needs from different industry sectors, such as the automotive, oil, and biomedical fields, Cao noted, with some applications directly connected with people's daily life, such as weather forecasts.

“Besides supercomputing centers, the platform should also connect people, applications, and services,” Cao said. The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area is home to many scientific research teams, so has a greater need for computing power, he pointed out.

The platform will also integrate computing power, applications, data, and communities to comprehensively allocate national computing power resources, Cao said. In this way, users will not need to invest much in hardware when developing AI applications and could complete complex computing tasks, such as training large language models, with the platform.

In the future, with affordable service fees, even individuals will be able to enjoy computing power services provided by the supercomputing network, according to Cao, said the Yicai Global report.

(Yuan XY)