The recent success of the Longteng server using a home-designed Loongson CPU is an important step in building China's proprietary IT industry and enhancing national security, say industry insiders.
Developed by Tianjin-based Dawning Information Industry Co Ltd, the Longteng server has "full Chinese proprietary intellectual property from the hardware to the operating system, application software and middleware", said Deng Hongsheng, the director of Dawning's Longteng server department.
Middleware is a kind of software that allows multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact.
The Longteng server with the Loongson 3A quad-core CPU can accommodate the NeoKylin and NFS operating systems developed by Chinese companies based on Linux.
The Longteng server has "particularly high security, because its hardware and software are both home-developed", said Nie Hua, vice-president of the company.
"It will help eliminate the security problems currently existing in many fields in our country, such as e-business and national defense," he said.
"It will also increase our capability in information security management."
The development of China's proprietary computer science technologies is gaining increased international attention.
Two years ago, a story in the popular US-based computing magazine Wired said "the Loongson chip is going to change more than just computer ownership rates in the most populous nation on the planet".
"It's going to have a profound impact on computers everywhere," said the article titled "The People's Processor".
Dawning President Li Jun noted "if we want a Chinese CPU to become mainstream, we have to take it out of the lab to the market and let it join the competition".
Li Guojie, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said the arrival of the Longteng server will "integrate many of China's other recent achievements in core electronics components, high-end chips and basic software", helping promote the commercialization of the Loongson series CPU.
The success will also help develop a number of related home-developed products including operating systems, middleware, and database and application software to help establish China's own IT industry chain, said Li.
The central and Tianjin governments each granted Dawning a 15 million yuan ($2.3 million) subsidy to build a production line making five types of servers based on the Loongson CPU. The company aims to sell 1,000 servers over the next year.
Deng noted an additional benefit is the server's eco-friendly design.
"In addition, we took the concept of eco-friendliness into consideration and implemented a series of energy-saving measures," he said.
Founded in 1996, the company built the Dawning Nebulae supercomputer last year that has a computing speed of 1.27 petaflops per second, the second-fastest in the world.
