A view of Chinese supercomputer Sunway TaihuLight File photo: VCG

The High Performance Computing Center was unveiled on Tuesday in Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu Province, where it will provide industry users with real-time, efficient large-scale computing services. 

Analysts said that computing power is the key to the transformation of China's information industry.

The center was built by the China Future Internet Engineering Center (CFIEC) and launched at the Global Network Technology Conference 2019 (GNTC) in Nanjing. Relying on IPv6 networks, which allow for vast access from various devices, and related infrastructure, the center will be a large-scale computing platform and distributed storage platform for mass data and application scenarios, the Science and Technology Daily reported.

"Computing power is the key to the transformation of China's information industry," Liu Gang, director of the Nankai Institute of Economics and chief economist at the Chinese Institute of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Strategies, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

As of June 2019, the number of active users of IPv6 networks in China reached 130 million, according to the China Statistical Report on Internet Development, which was released in August. 

"China has entered the stage of intelligent construction. China's huge population and market generate huge amounts of data. China has completed the construction of IPv6 and 5G networks, or new infrastructure. 

"IPv6, a protocol that provides end-to-end datagram transmission, ensures the collection of information, and 5G technology works as a high-speed channel to transfer massive volumes of data to the cloud for processing," said Liu. 

"Intelligent information management has three main elements: algorithms, big data and computing power. Each company has developed its own algorithms and China's huge market provides sources for big data, turning computing power into a bottleneck for the information industry. Therefore, computing power is the key to the information transformation in China," Liu added.

The prototype of a new generation of exascale supercomputers, which can carry out 1 billion billion calculations per second, has been completed, showing an increasing capacity for independent innovation in network information technology in China, according to the China Internet development report 2019, which was released during the GNTC on Sunday.

"With the diversification of application scenarios, such as shopping festivals launched by various e-commerce platforms and online train ticket purchases, processing a large amount of information in a short time becomes a must-have ability, which requires a lot of computing power," Liu added.

The analyst said that China's supercomputer technology is firmly in the forefront of the world, and will certainly surpass the US in the future. China has the ability to process data flows as big as those generated in the "Double 11" shopping festival, where more than 1 billion orders were made within a single day in 2018.