China's supercomputer maker makes IPO debut

SHANGHAI -- Chinese tech company Dawning Information Industry listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Thursday with an initial public offering (IPO) price set at 5.29 yuan ($0.88) per share.

The Beijing-based IT enterprise, backed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the developer of the China-made supercomputer, Nebulae, which is a 1.27 petaflop-per second system located in the Shenzhen branch of the National Supercomputing Center.

As China's first high-computing stock, Dawning issued 75 million shares to raise 400 million yuan on the stock market.

The supercomputer Nebulae or Dawning 6000 ranked second in the TOP 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers in 2010. The computing speed was soon doubled by another China-developed Tianhe-1, co-developed by the National University of Defense and Technology and other computer science institutes.

Dawning announced a plan to develop Dawning 7000, a new generation supercomputer, in May. The new design will be equipped to better meet commercial market demands for high-speed communication networks, large-scale storage and application software.

High-computing technology has been widely used in the fields of energy, meteorology, aviation and astronautics, biomedicine and industrial manufacturing. Its users also include research institutes, colleges, enterprises and government departments.

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