A collection of Chinese political and computing luminaries assembled in Beijing last week to applaud the launch of the country's first "self-developed" supercomputer.

The Legend Deepcomp 1800 large scale computer system has been built by Hong Kong-based Legend Holdings, and is the first computer in the country to hit 1,000 GFLOPS. Legend said the machine ranked 25th in the world rankings of high-performance computers.

In a statement, Legend president and CEO Yang Yuanqing claimed the successful development of the system "will end the monopoly of foreign computer products in China's high-performance computing market".

The 14-meter-long machine features 526 Intel Xeon CPUs, 272GB of RAM and 6TB of storage. It will be installed at the Academy of Mathematics and System Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

© ComputerWire