China sets broad tech goals for 2006 and beyond
Goals for the next five years reflect China's desire to encourage innovation among local companies
Follow @infoworldAs China heads into its 11th five-year plan, the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has laid out a set of technology-development goals it hopes to achieve during the plan's first year.
Five-year plans are a legacy of China's communist history. Once used to dictate production targets for China's economy, the plans have since evolved into a general outline of government policy goals in the areas of economic and social development. The 11th five-year plan will cover the period from 2006 through 2010. Details are under discussion by China's National People's Congress (NPC), which is holding its annual session in Beijing.
There are no major surprises contained in the plans now under consideration. "The plans are consistent with the government's goals that have been set for the past two to three years," said Jason Yin, managing director of In-Stat China.
China's high-technology goals for the next five years largely reflect the government's desire to encourage innovation among local companies, Yin said. "That's the most important part of their plans," he said.
Among MII's policy objectives for the coming year is continued support for the development of China's semiconductor industry. The ministry also plans to allocate additional funding for development of the Linux operating system and applications, according to an outline of objectives released by MII's Science and Technology Division.
The development and deployment of advanced wireless technologies, such as wireless broadband networks and TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access), a 3G (third-generation) mobile technology, will also receive backing from the ministry, the document said.
Other objectives of the 11th five-year plan have emerged during the ongoing NPC meeting. Among the high-technology projects being considered are efforts to develop semiconductor manufacturing technology for 90-nanometer and more advanced processes, deployment of a national digital TV network, and development of technologies needed for a petaflop computing system, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
A petaflop computer would be able to handle one quadrillion floating-point operations per second. Currently, the most powerful computer produced in China is Dawning Information Industry's Dawning 4000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center. That computer, which has a maximum theoretical performance of 11,264 gigaflops, or billion floating-point operations per second, is ranked No. 42 on the list of the world's 500 most powerful computers.
While development of a petaflop system would be many years away, the 11th five-year plan also sets a more immediate goal of producing teraflop computers, which are capable of processing trillions of floating-point operations per second.
