Engineers achieve breakthrough

Chinese engineers have for the first time designed and produced an advanced server and database system as an alternative to foreign-made products that currently dominate the domestic market, according to the Beijing Institute of Computer Technology and Application.

Researchers at the institute, a subsidiary of China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp's Second Academy, used domestically designed processors, servers, operating systems and software to build the Tianyue Data Warehouse Appliance.

Tianyue is capable of performing about 9.4 million transactions per minute in testing scenarios designed by the China Software Testing Center and Tsinghua University. This means it can deliver the third-fastest database performance in the world after Oracle's SPARC Supercluster and IBM's Power 780 Server, said Gu Peng, a senior designer in charge of the machine's development at the institute.