Chapter 353: Making Up for the Giant Machine's Shortcomings

The summer in Ha Cheng is still very comfortable, the air brings coolness, here there's no need to install air conditioning, it's naturally suitable for escaping the heat.

However, in the meeting room of Ha Gong Da, the atmosphere is somewhat heated now.

"San Shui, you mean we should run directly from this north side to the south side? If so, we'd always be running back and forth, which would be inconvenient!"

"How is it inconvenient? By plane! I'll go to the Air Force and get them to open a route from Ha Cheng to Deep City, then we can fly back and forth!"

Taking the train might take three days and three nights, but by plane you arrive in a single day!

"Deep City has just been built; the conditions there…… might not be suitable for us……"

"How could it be impossible? Construction started in '79, and three years have passed; there, earth-shaking changes are happening, almost changing daily. After we go, we can also experience Deep City's speed and use that experience to drive our development!"

"Alright. Since you insist, let's go to Deep City!"

The big shot was initially shocked by Qin Miao's opinion, and various problems flooded his mind; now that Qin Miao responds fluently, there's nothing more to say—let's go to Deep City and build a new campus!

"According to the plan, we will establish a marine engineering major there; Deep City is after all a coastal city, with shipyards nearby, also suitable for this industry's development… San Shui, do you have any other suggestions?"

"We also need to develop high-tech industries; for example, to develop marine engineering, we can make underwater robots! At the same time, our electronic technology can also be relocated there, where we can better understand what advanced chips the market needs."

"Oh, San Shui, when you mention chips, I recall that the National University of Defense Technology sent people to inspect our Dragon Core; they want to use Dragon Core to build a giant computer!"

What?

Qin Miao's eyes lit up instantly, great!

He had wanted to do this for a long time, just never had the chance.

Computers are necessities of modern society, but in the 1980s, giant computers were national heavyweights!

Currently, domestic computers only perform a million operations; using them to calculate satellite orbits is already difficult, and other applications require faster computers.

For example, the Petroleum Department's exploration data must be sent to a giant computer for calculation; domestically lacking such equipment, we can only send it abroad, which not only costs huge sums but also lets foreign powers control national resources.

Weather forecasting also needs a giant computer; existing computers can at most calculate data for one or two days, so if severe weather arises, we cannot respond in time—things like rainstorms and floods require advance preparation of several days.

The country needs a giant computer!

Actually, looking at later eras, personal computer performance is very strong; for example, a 3 GHz processor performs tens of operations per second, while high-end graphics cards can reach hundreds of millions of billions of operations per second.

One could say that today's supercomputers still can't match an ordinary personal computer from later eras, but in the 1980s, this was an unbridgeable chasm for the East.

To cross this chasm, in 1978 the state decided to develop a computer capable of one hundred million operations per second, with the National University of Defense Technology in charge; by 1983, Galaxy One was successfully developed, becoming a source of national pride.

However, compared to world-leading standards, it's still insufficient.

Cray-2, the United States' most advanced supercomputer, can already complete twenty billion floating-point operations per second!

And in the East, not until 1992 did the Galaxy-2 computer appear, delivering only one billion operations per second, still a large gap from the West.

But now it's different—we have our own Dragon Core processor!

Early giant computers used dedicated processors and dedicated architectures, but later, with microprocessor development, supercomputers began using ordinary microprocessors; to achieve higher computing power, you just add more processors.

"San Shui, what… what are you up to?"

"I'm going to check on the development of the computer project."

"If you want to listen, we could just call them and have them report; you're going to the Capital this time, didn't you promise many projects to the superiors? You need to arrange those projects first."

"Alright."

After Qin Miao finished reporting all his contracted projects, Engineer Niu led in several people wearing military uniforms.

"San Shui, you're back!"

"Yeah, Engineer, I heard our Dragon Core is to be the brain of the giant computer; I'm excited, but I can't get away here, so I bothered you to come over."

"No trouble, no trouble, come, let me introduce you—this is Lao Ci, the person in charge of Galaxy One."

Lao Ci, born in 1917, graduated from Hunan University in 1942, then worked at Qinghua Daxue's Physics Department; initially doing wireless and radar communications, later shifting to computers, and by the 1970s he was already the head of the Computer Department in the College of Military Engineering.

Under his leadership, many computers were developed, especially the 441-model large transistor general-purpose digital computer, which is his masterpiece.

"This is Lao Hu, the chief engineer."

"Everyone, please sit, please sit!"

After sitting down, Lao Ci began his introduction.

"Back then, after the 785 Project was approved, we obtained technical data from the US Cray-1 computer; therefore, we conducted the overall design of this structure, mainly adopting a dual-vector array architecture scheme…… Now, we want to switch to microprocessors, and we are researching how to apply them."

Giant computers all use specialized processors, Galaxy One is no exception; if they now want to use microprocessors, what structure should they use? No giant computer in the world uses microprocessors yet—this would be the first!

"This is simple; just use a distributed shared memory structure." Qin Miao said.

As for what structure the giant computers of this era have, Qin Miao truly doesn't know, but speaking of the structure used by future supercomputers, he is perfectly clear.

Take the renowned Shenwei Taihu Light as an example: it has forty computing cabinets and eight network cabinets; each computing cabinet is about the size of a double-door refrigerator; opening it reveals four circuit boards, each with thirty-two computing plugs, each plug containing four computing nodes, each node made of two Shenwei processors.

These processors working together form a supercomputer with a computing speed of 12.5 exaFLOPS, and it is also the world's first!

After decades of effort, we have finally begun to lead in the field of supercomputing!

Since Qin Miao has been reborn, let's start leading from now!