First Chinese high-end server breaks cover

The first Chinese developed high-end server has been unveiled, in a move that officials say will help lessen the country's dependence on foreign manufacturers.

According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Tiansuo K1 System is a fault-tolerant server, made by Inspur Group in Shandong.

Some 750 million yuan (A$114.2 million) was spent on developing the K1, which made its debut in in the country's capital Beijing yesterday. 

The academy said China has been dependent on overseas companies like HP and IBM for high-end servers, which apart from raising costs also constituted data security risks, according to Yang Xianwu, the deputy director of the high and new technology department at the ministry of science and technology.

A survey cited by the academy showed that the price of high-end servers in China was 2.4 times higher than in the United States.

China's high-end server market is rapidly expanding and stood at A$2.3 billion last year.

Available via e-commerce site Alibaba, the Tiansuo K1 can be configured with up to 32 Intel Itanium 9300 series quad core processors and a maximum of two terabytes of memory.

The fault-tolerant K1 is designed with a tightly-coupled CC-NUMA architecture and offers a  maximum floating point performance is 800 gigaFLOPs.