Environmental industries growing in China: Analysts

Environmental industries are growing fast in China as the government attaches great importance to environmental protection, managers and analysts said.

At an environment services industry expo in Xi’an, capital of northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, companies exhumed great confidence in the industry.

Li Maolin, vice president of Guandong Dongri Environmental Protection Co. Ltd., said the company had strong sales in recent years after its founding in 2003.

“Previously we mainly sold water treatment facilities for factories and cities, now as the public environmental awareness grows, there is a great market potential for the general use of these facilities,” he said.

Last year, the company sold 80 million yuan (about 12 million U.S. dollars) worth of waste water treatment facilities to rural households. This year sales volume is

Qingdao Dongyang Technology Co. Ltd. also eyes the potential for garbage processing equipment in the vast countryside, said sales manager Yang Tao.

“We have sold many garbage processing facilities to Henan Province. I expect strong growth fo expected to exceed 100 million yuan, he said.

“If the industrial market is red sea, the market for general users is blue sea, full of market potential,” he said.

Analysts said investment in the environmental industry during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, from 2016 to 2020, is expected to reach 17 trillion yuan. Annual growth rate will reach 20%.

“The 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China has set new target for environmental protection. China’s environmental protection is really expanding and going deep,” said Liu Qifeng, deputy head of the China Association of Environmental Protection Industry.

Towards Exascale computing, Chinese company achieves 1st OPA based Torus switch As the flops of a supercomputer arrived Petascale and will reach Exascale, the efficient communication among thousands of nodes becomes a million dollar question.

One pioneer solution has been given as the Silicon Switch, OPA based Torus topology switch, which was released by Chinese high-performance computing company Sugon at the Super Computer Conference (SC17) this week in Denver in the U.S. state of Colorado.

“After much discussion, we formed a joint team. And that team collaborated internationally for over a year to produce this product,” Joe Yaworski, Intel OPA marketing director told Xinhua.

“This is just a great example how the two countries, the two companies and the two organisations can work together. This is really a good example of international cooperation to develop products,” he said.

Large-scale supercomputers, especially those quasi-Exascale or Exascale systems, are facing severe challenges in terms of system scale, scalability, cost, energy consumption, reliability, etc.

The new released Silicon Switch, supports the cold-plate direct liquid cooling as well, adopts the Torus architecture and the state-of-art OPA technology, and then carries more competitive features, including advanced performance, almost infinite scalability, and excellent fault tolerance ability, according to Sugon.

“It shall be a wise choice for Exascale supercomputer,” Dr. Li Bin, General Manager of Business Department for HPC Product of Sugon, said in a news release.

Compared with the traditional Fat-tree network topology, the Torus direct network, which emphasises the neighboring interconnection, has obvious advantages in scalability and cost/performance, since it only holds a linear dependency between the network cost and the system scale.

In addition, the rich redundant data paths and the dynamic routing give inherent superiority in fault tolerance ability.

All these features well meet the requirements of Exascale supercomputer and pave a new trend of high-speed network technology, researchers say.