Galaxy (supercomputer series)

Galaxy (Chinese: 銀河; pinyin: Yínhé), also called "Yinhe" or "Milky Way", refers to a series of supercomputers developed by the National University of Defense Technology of China, beginning in the early 1980s. The series played a foundational role in the development of China's high‑performance computing capabilities and laid the groundwork for later systems such as Tianhe-1 and Tianhe-2.

History

Galaxy‑I

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping said "China cannot achieve the Four Modernizations without supercomputers!", and entrusted the development of the supercomputer to the National University of Defense Technology. Professor Ci Yungui was appointed as the chief designer.

In 1983, China's first supercomputer, the "Galaxy-1" or "Yinhe-1", capable of performing over 100 million operations per second (MFLOPS), was successfully developed by the National University of Defense Technology. And China became the third country in the world, after the United States and Japan, to successfully develop a supercomputer. General Zhang Aiping gladly inscribed the name "银河" ("Yinghe" or "Galaxy") for the machine.

Galaxy‑II

In March, 1988, the Galaxy‑II (or Yinhe-II) project started. It completed in 1992, achieving performance on the order of 1 billion operations per second. "Galaxy-II" made China one of the few countries in the world at that time capable of issuing medium- and long-term numerical weather forecasts.