computer science

Sugon

Sugon is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Sugon rather than just read about it. In short: Sugon (Chinese: 曙光; pinyin: Shǔguāng), officially Dawning Information Industry Company Limited, is a supercomputer manufacturer based in the People's Republic of China. The company is a spin-off from research done at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and still has close links to it.

Key takeaways

Sugon belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Sugon to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Sugon from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Sugon (Chinese: 曙光; pinyin: Shǔguāng), officially Dawning Information Industry Company Limited, is a supercomputer manufacturer based in the People's Republic of China. The company is a spin-off from research done at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and still has close links to it.

History The company is a development of work done at the Institute of Computer Science, CAS. Under the Chinese government's 863 Program, for the research and development of high technology products, the group launched their first supercomputer (Dawning No. 1) in 1993. In 1996 the group launched the Dawning Company to allow the transfer of research computers into the market. The company was tasked with developing further supercomputers under the 863 program, which led to the Dawning 5000A and 6000 computers. The company was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2014. CAS still retains stock in the company. Sugon is an investor in technology company GoLaxy. In May 2025, it was announced that Sugon would merge with Hygon Information Technology.

U.S. sanctions

According to the United States Department of Defense the company has links to the People's Liberation Army and, in 2019, Sugon was added to the Bureau of Industry and Security's Entity List due to U.S. national security concerns. In November 2020, the then President of the United States Donald Trump issued an executive order prohibiting any American company or individual from owning shares in companies that the United States Department of Defense has listed as having links to the People's Liberation Army, which included Sugon. In October 2022, the United States Department of Defense added Sugon to a list of "Chinese military companies" operating in the U.S.

Supercomputers

Dawning was the company's initial name; it was later changed to Sugon. The computers are originally known by their Dawning moniker, but can also use Sugon names in the literature. The model series is as below.

Dawning No.1 The first supercomputer created was Dawning No.1 (Shuguang Yihao, 曙光一号), which received state certification in October 1993. This supercomputer achieved 640 million FLOPS, and utilizes Motorola 88100 CPUs (4 total) and 88200 CPUs (8 total), and over 20 were built. The operating system is UNIX V.

Dawning 1000 The Dawning 1000 was Sugon's second generation supercomputer, and was originally named Dawning No.2 (Shuguang Erhao, 曙光二号). Dawning 1000 was released in 1995, and received state certification on 11 May 1995. The family of supercomputers could achieve 2.5 GFLOPS. This series of the Dawning family consists of the Dawning 1000A and 1000L.

Dawning 2000 The Dawning 2000 was initially released in 1996, and could achieve a peak performance of 4 GFLOPS. A further variant, the Dawning 2000-I, was released in 1998 with a peak performance of 20 GFLOPS. The final model in the series, the Dawning 2000-II, was released in 1999 with a peak performance of 111.7 GFLOPS. The Dawning 2000 passed state certification on 28 January 2000. The supercomputer model was designed as a cluster to achieve over 100 GLOPS peak performance. The number of CPUs used was greatly increased to 164 in comparison to older models, and like earlier models, the operating system is UNIX.

Dawning 3000 The Dawning 3000 passed state certification on 9 March 2001. Like the Dawning 2000, the system was designed as a cluster, and could achieve 400 GFLOPS peak performance. The number of CPU increased to 280, and the system consists of ten 2-meter tall racks, weighing 5 tons total. Power consumption is 25 kW, and one of the tasks it was used for was the part of human genome mapping that China was responsible for.

Dawning 4000A The fifth member of the Dawning family, Dawning 4000A, debuted as one of the top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world on the TOP500 list, capable of 806.1 billion FLOPS. The system, at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center, utilizes over 2,560 AMD Opteron processors, and can reach speeds of 8 teraflops.

Dawning 5000 The Dawning 5000 series was initially planned to use indigenous Loongson processors. However Shanghai Supercomputer Center required Microsoft Windows support whereas Loongson only ran under Linux. The resulting Dawning 5000A uses 7,680 1.9 GHz AMD Opteron Quad-core processors, resulting in 30,720 cores, with an Infiniband interconnecting network. The computer occupies an area of 75 square meters and the power consumption is 700 kW. The supercomputer is capable of 180 teraflops and received state certification in June 2008. The Dawning 5000A was ranked 10th in the November 2008 TOP500 list. Additionally at the time, it was also the largest system using Windows HPC Server 2008 for this benchmark. This system is also installed at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center and runs with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.

Dawning 6000 The Dawning 6000 was announced in 2011, at 300 TFLOPS, incorporating 3000 8-core Loongson 3B processors at 3.2 GFLOP/W. It is the "first supercomputer made exclusively of Chinese components" and has a projected speed of over a PFLOP (one quadrillion operations per second). For comparison, the fastest supercomputer as of June 2014 runs at 33 PFLOPS. The same announcement said that a petascale supercomputer was under development and that the launch was anticipated in 2012 or 2013.

See also Shanghai Supercomputer Center Nebulae - Dawning TC3600

References

External links Official website

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Sugon

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Sugon claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Sugon before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Sugon ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Sugon

In research: Sugon appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Sugon in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Sugon is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Chinese entities subject to U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctions, Computer hardware companies, Defence companies of China, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Sugon outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Sugon in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Sugon means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Sugon out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Sugon in simple terms?

Why does Sugon matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Sugon?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Sugon.