From rick@cs.arizona.edu Wed Aug 14 02:55:35 1991 From: rick@cs.arizona.edu (Rick Schlichting) Newsgroups: comp.research.japan,soc.culture.china Subject: Kahaner Report: Computing and related S&T activities in China (PRC) Date: 12 Aug 91 17:29:26 GMT Followup-To: comp.research.japan [Dr. David Kahaner is a numerical analyst visiting Japan for two-years under the auspices of the Office of Naval Research-Asia (ONR/Asia). The following is the professional opinion of David Kahaner and in no way has the blessing of the US Government or any agency of it. All information is dated and of limited life time. This disclaimer should be noted on ANY attribution.] [Copies of previous reports written by Kahaner can be obtained from host cs.arizona.edu using anonymous FTP.] To: Distribution From: David K. Kahaner, ONR Asia [kahaner@xroads.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp] Re: Computing and related S&T activities in China (PRC) 12 August 1991 This file is named "computing.ch" ABSTRACT. An overview of computing and related activities in China (PRC). INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY. This report is a complement to earlier reports on Chinese computing, (xian.rpt, 14 Aug 1991; tiawan, 17 Jan 1991; hongkong.91, 11 July 1991). It is based on one visit to PRC during June 1991 and reading of some English literature and English translations. In many ways mainland China (People's Republic of China-- PRC) is a modern industrial nation, and in others a poor third world country. High tech industries in China are struggling because of the usual problems associated with partially developed countries. There are additional problems related to restrictions on trade from the US and EC because of political differences. Lack of good communication facilities such as computer networks and fax machines means that information flow is erratic; several of the scientists we spoke to were unaware of activities in neighboring Chinese institutions, while others appeared to be exceptionally well connected. Electronic mail is just beginning to appear. Access to computers is generally erratic. There is a heavy emphasis on simulation and theory when experimentation might be better. Basic theoretical research (pencil and paper) is excellent, especially in applied mathematical analysis. We saw no parallel computing activity although reading available reference materials indicates that some work is in progress. We were not able to assess research in computer science either, except it was clear that computer engineering is very active. Fuzzy logic, for example, has a tremendous following, and there are a great many applications being developed for industrial processes, perhaps more than in the US. (See the anecdotal list of applications given below, as well as papers on the topic listed in the forthcoming report (xian.rpt, 14 Aug 1991). Access to Western research information also appears spotty. Some lectures at a conference we attended in Xi'an suggested a very out of date view of Western literature. On the other hand senior scientists travel to and study in the West and read and write English fairly well. But many Chinese scientists have not travelled outside of their country, and have not had much opportunity to use spoken English. There also appears to be substantial library facilities at least at some institutions. Communicating in English seems to be more of a problem than in Japan, but this is also very variable. There is no doubt that China is trying very hard to push science and technology as a means to move itself forward. Numerous studies have emphasized that the country that invented paper, movable type, gunpowder, and the compass has had no similar scientific achievements in recent times. Four volumes of "S&T white papers" have been published since 1986 describing the Chinese government's significant policy and strategy decisions, related materials, and regulations for scientists and others. It is hoped, for example, that by the year 2000 high-tech industries will become pillars of China's national economy, traditional industries will improve their productivity, the internal consumer market will fuel other improvements, and even military research institutes will shift strategically toward civilian products, as is now occurring in the Soviet Union. Thus there is plenty of interest, ample reports, and relatively large quantities of money to be spent on R&D, although it must be spread over a huge infrastructure. For example, the State Science and Technology Commission will funnel over $2B US into high-tech development during the '90s. For better or worse, China has over 7500 scientific research organizations at the county level or above, a high-tech work force of more than 3 million including about 400,000 scientific research personnel, almost as many as in the US or Japan, and more than in England. Many of the policies for promoting S&T are common to other industrializing countries and will not be detailed here. A typical quote, "we should strengthen reverse engineering and digest, absorb, improve, and develop imported technology, take advantage of our vast population and raise design starting points. An example is importing and digesting French engine technologies as a basis for reverse design and absorbing new engine technologies from foreign countries for development and innovation to design and develop our own new type of engine.." At the same time that the Chinese government is trying to open itself to the international scientific community there is also a substantial amount of of old-line inertia and flowery governmental prose in published documents. This is compounded by official concerns about giving away secrets to foreign intelligence agents. However, all the experiences during our recent visit suggest that individual Chinese scientists are just as eager as those anywhere to engage in cooperation and free scientific information exchange. Let us do everything possible to encourage and support this attitude. CHINESE KEY NATIONAL LABORATORIES. A plan to build national key labs in universities and research institutes began in 1984. The focus has been on building and operating open labs, setting up a new research system, promoting collaboration and cooperation, personnel buildup, establishing a good academic atmosphere, and managing the labs. More than 60 national labs were built since 1984. In addition, the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) also has invested in setting up a similar number of academic labs and institutes which are university-like (including some students) but in a different organizational chain. Further, more labs have been proposed, so that there could be on the order of 150 by 1995. The Chinese government is now focusing on the fact that building a high class laboratory involves not only a large one-time construction cost, but a high on-going operational cost. There is now a trend to consolidate some labs to make their operations more cost effective, make research funds less diffuse and make sure that research directions are not divided too finely. There are still many problems related to "turf", and cooperation as well as communication between labs needs improving. There are also a number of issues related to personnel, such as getting lab leaders of international stature (the target here is the Cavendish Laboratory with Maxwell and Rayleigh as early directors), getting (and keeping) enough young researchers and support technicians who will make most of the actual breakthroughs. Of course the perennial problem of logistic support occurs too. To operate the labs it is recommended that "operation is more important than construction", "academic atmosphere is more important that current academic standard", and "management is more important than current experimental condition". 863 PROGRAM. This is the major plan for S&T development, proposed in March 1986. It is centered around five areas, with its main focus to catch up with advanced technology. Five areas are of special interest. * Biotechnology * Information technology (see below) * Automation technology (especially a demo production line at Qinghua Univ, comprehensive automated manufacturing systems, high performance sensor technology, multiphase system control technology, and robots for precision work, work beyond 300 meters depth, and work in difficult environments) * New materials (especially for high temperature and shock resistance, high malleability, for power equipment, aerospace materials, micromaterials, thermoplastic resins, ceramic-base, semiconductor photoelectric, optical memory, artificial crystals, membrane materials, non-crystalline, superconducting materials, etc., to the late 1980's levels.) * Energy resource technology The Chinese government has also initiated a "Torch Program" to ensure that any advances of 386 will be put into commercial/industrial use. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT). A large number of articles in the Chinese official, popular, and technical literature have emphasized the importance of IT as part of China's High Technology Development Plan, also called 863 Plan, see above. In some articles IT is described as the most important of all the 386 projects. The IT aspects are divided into three general areas. * Information acquisition The plan is to develop a broad variety of information acquisition and processing technologies for industrial and agricultural needs especially in the areas of infrared detection, adaptive optical telescopes, imaging radar technology (including satellite-carried synthetic aperture radar and infrared focal plane technology), high speed real-time signal processing and graphics. * Optoelectronics The plan is to develop all kinds of novel optoelectronic devices and associated system integration technology for sensing, computing and communications, and study new ways to fabricate VLSI in order to lay the technical and material groundwork for new information acquisition systems, computers, and communication equipment. It is generally accepted in China that if the 20th century is the era of electronic information, then the 21st will be the era of optoelectronic information. * Intelligent computing The plan is to put the best people and resources in advanced computer technology and AI together to track the latest developments in the world, investigate the theoretical basis and key technology of intelligent computers, and promote the widespread use of AI to push for an intelligent computer industry in China. Processing Chinese characters is an important part of many projects associated with intelligent computing. All together there are about 300 projects, 2,500 scientists and technicians, and about 80 organizations. The Chinese are definitely attempting to pool resources into national research centers. For example, the intelligent computing work has been centered in the CAS Institute of Computing Technology. About one third of the projects have been completed, and the Chinese estimate that about one quarter of these are competitive with international scientific standards. The Chinese have stated that "we should encourage international joint R&D activities and strengthen cooperation among open laboratories, research centers, research institutes and higher-learning institutions in China. A unified, orderly, competitive and mutually complementary network of cooperation should be established." There is also great interest in having visiting researchers as well as sending Chinese students to other countries. For this, as well as other international activities, however, some non technical issues are also relevant. For example, "we must intensify their ideological and political education to firm up their patriotism, national pride and confidence, and faith in socialism," etc. As of 9/90 the Chinese government has broken out its information technology project accomplishments as follows. Topic World Domestic | Intermed Design Disseminate Total Level Leader | Results Final Applications ----- Intelligent Computing 12 35 | 21 21 5 47 Optoelectronics 7 31 | 33 3 2 38 Information Acquisition & Processing 3 10 | 8 0 5 13 -- -- -- -- -- -- Total 22 76 | 62 24 12 98 The descriptions below attempt to give a very brief picture of some of these projects. The remarks are fragmented and have all been gathered from available documentation. I have not had personal contact with these projects, so the descriptions may not be accurate. I should note that the Chinese scientists I spoke with were frank and realistic about the status of their work. But in print, projects are often described in exceptionally positive terms. This is especially true for summary reports. If readers are interested I will attempt to obtain further information about selected projects. COMPUTING, GENERAL. It is estimated that there are about half million PC type computers in China, with about two-thirds of Chinese manufacture, compared to about 25% in 1981. In 1985 about $1.2B US was spent on computer imports; in 1989 this had been reduced to $389M US. It is now hoped that Chinese systems can be exported, perhaps up to $1B US by 1995. Production includes complete systems, peripherals, monitors, printers, magnetic recording equipment, as well as system and application software. A major thrust of work has been input of Chinese characters. Computers manufactured in China are marketed under the names of Great Wall, Taiji, Zijin, and Legend. For example, Legend (Beijing Legend Computer Group, part of the Chinese Academy of Science CAS) markets 286, 386, 386SX, and 486 systems. A 386 system (33Mhz) has also been developed by CAS, with 66Mbit/sec transfer rate between memory and cpu, and a RISC based floating point unit. This system can be purchased with an independently designed 1280x1024 color card. In 1990 about 100K 286 mother boards were shipped to the US and Europe. China's first electron tube calculators were also made at the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) in 1958--a copy of a Soviet model; current production uses LSI technology. Changzou Electronic Computer Plant also markets a laptop based on a 4.77MHz 80C88 and supports both Chinese and standard Ascii characters. Another model uses memory card technology based on an independently designed and developed card. To the best of my knowledge China currently has no Western supercomputers. However, I was told last fall by representatives of Convex Computer that there were several sales close to finalization, and in March 1991 it was announced that 4 C120 Convex minisupers were approved for sale to arrive in late spring. Applications for these computers are seismological, petroleum prospecting, simulation of oil reserves, and weather. I do not know exactly where these systems are going. NEURAL NETS/EXPERT SYSTEMS. China's first neural net conference was held Dec 1990 in Beijing with representation from 100 Chinese institutions resulting in over 350 technical papers in the proceedings. Chinese Academy of Science (Institute of Automation) reports that they have applied a neural net model to diagnosing reactor faults, and have actually used this in practice. Naval Academy of Engineering professors have been promoting the use of neural nets for inference engines, claiming that they can be more flexible, fault-tolerant, and are more natural for learning. They have also published very basic theoretical results on new learning algorithms for multilayered nets which can find global minimums. Other work has shown by simulation (on digitized data of the silhouette of a US Naval and a Soviet Naval ship) that a simple neural net can be used for ship silhouette recognition independent of translation, scale, rotation, or aspect changes. CAS scientists have developed a Chinese speech recognition system using artificial neural net concepts, and including a voice operated text input system capable of recognizing over 20K dictionary entries. It is claimed that tone-recognition is over 99% and word-recognition is over 90% even with compound words. CAS researchers have developed a general purpose expert-system language, TUILI which can be referenced from either C or Prolog, and is claimed to be superior to Prolog. Qinghua Univ has Chinese character recognition system (THOCR-90) that can handle various fonts, alphabets, numbers, and other symbols, and employs neural-net techniques for pattern matching. Recognition speed is about 30 chars/sec on a 386/33. Another (somewhat faster) system has been developed at Nankai Univ. FUZZY. Work in this area has been active since 1979. There have been numerous practical applications and research results reported, perhaps more than in any other country outside of Japan. In 1987 Chinese scientists presented almost one quarter of the papers at an international fuzzy society conference in Japan, equal to those presented by Japanese attendees. Further, I was told that the (US) Journal of Fuzzy Sets and Systems is being flooded with papers from Chinese scientists. In China some specific applications include the following (these are all anecdotal). * CAS (Institute of Semiconductors) has built almost two dozen multi- logic circuits (two-value, multi-value, continuous-value, e.g. fuzzy). Chinese researchers are very much aware of work in Japan by Yamakawa who has built fuzzy-logic circuits using CMOS technology and in fact two researchers from Tsinghua Univ (Beijing) report that they have also built (using 5 micron) CMOS, various basic circuits that they claim are simpler and more reliable than Yamakawa's. * Electronics Industry Computing Center has developed a fuzzy- information processing command decision-support system designed specifically for use in communications networks used for military command decision support. * Math Dept of Beijing Teachers' Univ (BTU) developed a fuzzy inference engine capable of 15M inferences/second. BTU has also built hardware claimed to be able handle 30K (sic) basic rules with 2000 input/output variables for fuzzy based inference, and that products are being marketed this year. * Beijing Normal Univ has proposed a new method for fuzzy inference, called Truth-valued Flow Inference, which they claim can represent knowledge more effectively than traditional fuzzy inference. * North China Industrial Univ (NCIU) did a 6 year study on microcomputer fuzzy control theory and applications. * Various papers on fuzzy control simulation and adaptiveness of fuzzy control. * Staff & Workers College of Shanghai Instrument and Meter Industrial Co have developed proportionality-factor-type fuzzy controller and three-loop fuzzy controller. * Hunan Univ is using fuzzy composite control in gas smelter control systems. * Wuha Fist Sci Research Inst of Light Industry has a fuzzy control system for glass kilns. * Handran Resin Plant has a fuzzy control system for PVC resin polymerization process. * Univ of Petroleum used fuzzy control in large hysteresis systems for chemical engineering processes. * Chemical Fertilizer Industrial Inst, Jilin Industrial Univ, and Metal Products Inst have used fuzzy control for compressor regulation, power factor compensation, DC reversible-speed regulation, and a digital dual-frequency-channel amplitude frequency instrument. * Air Force Inst of Engineering developed a fuzzy quantitative evaluation expert system for aircraft maintenance. * Nanjing Univ use fuzzy theory to analyze evaluation of sound quality in high-fi sound systems. * Armed Forces Eco Inst used natural fuzzy language in expert systems. * Zhenjiang Shipping Inst used dBASE III to develop a fuzzy database inquiry system. * Central China Univ of S&T has used fuzzy quantization in knowledge engineering. * Univ of S&T for National Defense developed a PCB logic diagram/manuscript pattern-recognition system in C, using fuzzy relations among text areas. On a PC AT it is claimed to have a speed of 912 characters/minute and an accuracy of 98.9%. Another institute has also used fuzzy techniques and has complete system including software and scanner for installation on a variety of micros. It is not possible to know just how successful these projects have been as their descriptions are often brief, but the point is that Chinese scientists are exploring applications aggressively. At the same time there does not appear to be much emphasis on basic research for its own sake in this area. PARALLEL PROCESSING. My visit did not lead to learning about any parallel computing except for old ELXSI systems that appeared to be not seriously used, but the literature does describe several projects of potential interest. Wuhan Digital Engin Res Inst developed the 980 STAR systolic array computer. This is composed of a host (Intel 310/286), image subsystem, interface processor, and systolic computing array. The latter consists of a 4x4 matrix of cells. Pipeline beat is 200ns, and each cell is capable of 10mips. Maximum throughput is 80Mbytes/sec. Various system software has also been developed. This is considered mid 1980's technology. A new model is currently being developed, and is claimed to have 100 times greater performance. Programming on China's YH-1 (Galaxy-1) supercomputer has been via vectorized Fortran. (I am trying to learn more about this.) Current work is also in progress to develop a parallel programming capability, centered on C. There is also research on analyzing blocks of vector Fortran for vector block dependencies and a Pascal scheduler has been developed. It is claimed that some Cray 1 calls such as VF.MUL (vector float mult) can be reduced from 644 to 381 beats. The Galaxy is a 100mips machine. One specific application has been has been for processing seismological data from sections taken from petroleum prospecting areas. East China Inst of Computing Tech has a microcomputer parallel processing system based on 12 Inmos T800 transputers grouped into three clusters (boards), and connected to a PC-AT. One processor on each cluster is the main control processor. Peak performance is 80mips or 10MFlops. Jiangnam Institute has developed and marketed a PC board insert with an Inmos Transputer and 8Mbyte RAM, and software for development. Qinghua Univ has developed boards with 1, 2, or 4 transputers (TTH-1A, - 2A, and -4A) that will plug into PC-ATs, and also developed a transputer development system. These products are claimed to be fully compatible with European Transputers at the late 1980's level. Shantou & Nanjing Univ researchers have built an eight processor parallel computer (Transcube) built around 8 Inmos T414 transputers and an additional 1Mbyte of memory on each processor. The 8 PEs are the bottom layer of the 3-layer system, in which the top layer is the PC AT host, and the middle layer is an interface buffer controller. The researchers claim that it is easy to expand the system beyond 8 PEs. Graduate students at a research institute of Ministry of Machine-Building & Electronics Industry have used two TI DSP chips to design a real-time parallel signal processing circuit for a pulse doppler ground surveillance (moving target) radar. They claim to have solved two key problems which had caused bottlenecks related to data input and synchronous coordination of both chips, and that the system performs at 20M multiplications/additions per second and consumes 5 watts. Fudan Univ researchers have developed a sea-wave processing system based on diffraction analysis of sea-waves. The system (which runs on an XT) can estimate the spectrum of a 2D 512x512 image array with 16 azimuthal inputs in 9 minutes with wave direction accuracy of 6 degrees, and 18 minutes for 32 inputs and accuracy of 3 degrees. SOFTWARE. RT/VMS is a Chinese developed military real-time operating system. The Chinese military feels that a major threat of future wars will be from computer viruses, rather than traditional weapons, and there has been a substantial effort to study and eliminate computer viruses within China. (Frankly I had not thought about this before, but it is an intriguing view.) RT/VMS is claimed to have innovations in channel interfacing, job scheduling, low system overhead, and hardware debugging technology. The Commission of Science, Tech and Industry for National Defense has developed an Ada compiler (in C), which is claimed to be the first Ada compiler to simulate a multiprocessor environment on a single processor Unix systems. More than 4000 modules in the compiler have passed ACVC1.10 verification as specified by DOD in 1989. CAS has moved all the Unix SVR3.1 source code from an ATT 3B2 to a Vax 11/750 by cross compilation and reverse engineering. They have also moved the top layers of this system to a 386/Xenix. CAS claims that this is the first domestic (Chinese) movement of a full Unix system. ROBOTS. * Chinese Academy of Science reports that in the early 1980s they proposed establishment of a robot demonstration project which began operation in 1989. The cost was 58M Yuan plus $5.9M (US) foreign exchange. This is now called CAS Shenyang Robotics Engineering R&D Center and occupies 34,000m^2 of building space. The plan is to use this a base to produce robots and develop and manufacture more products. Many related projects spring from this one. * A medium-size underwater robot (Recon-IV-300-SIA-02) is being sold to the US. This is claimed to be an improvement on a prototype brought from the US. 90% of this robot's parts are of Chinese manufacture. Robot has audio, video, sonar, two hands and can perform five or six functions. Closed-loop control of depth and direction of navigation is included, payload is 160kg, and maximum speed is 3knots. * A light-weight underwater robot (Gold Fish) also made in China is used in oil drilling, sea rescue, dam inspection and repair. * Nankai and Tianjin University have jointly developed a robot with vision, hearing and touch capability (NKRC-03), which can automatically control the amount of force when it grabs an object. This is claimed to be at the 1980s level world wide and state of the art in China. This robot uses the NKV robot language to allow high level language programming; a standard second generation robot. FACTORY AUTOMATION. China Huajiing Electronics group claims that after a two year effort by more than 100 scientists they have developed China's first independently designed integrated-circuit CAM system, consisting of 10 subsystems (planning, production, management, process technique, quality control, economics, operations, materials, plate making, statistics, system management). Beijing Inst of Machine Tools has built a physical simulation system for studying the various software parts of a flexible manufacturing system based on linear rail guided carts. The system can simulate transport, loading/unloading, control, and specific aspects of a machining operation. The above suggests that there is are a great many projects in the area of manufacturing. Most of these are related to automation and associated machine tool and numerical control equipment. For example, last year the Second Chinese Machine Tool and Instruments Expo was held in Beijing, and various newly developed machine tools, numerical control systems, sensors, CAD software systems, etc., were on display (226 metal cutting machines, 67 lathes, 37 grinders, turning centers, etc). There are, in fact over 2000 machine tool products manufactured in China, mostly for domestic use. However the Chinese machine-too building industry is also trying to design products that will be marketable internationally (some have been already) and have identified several products that they claim are of world class, for example a six-axis, four-link hobbing machine computer numerical control system which can be used for machining ellipsoidal gears. Another example is a unit for machining small diameter holes which is claimed to be twice as fast and equal in other specifications to a Raycon (US) product. There are also cooperative agreements with major international companies such as Fanuc-Besc, GE, Werner-Kolb, and Schiess (German). It is not necessary to be an expert in this area to appreciate the main thrust, that the Chinese want not only to become self sufficient but also to become net exporters of this technology. OPTOELECTRONICS. * 140Mbit/s hybrid optical terminal, and 622 Mbit/s hybrid integrated- component module and distributed feedback laser diode. * 1.5micron single-mode narrow-line-width tunable semiconductor laser, semiconductor travelling-wave optical amp, Er-doped glass fiber amp, lithium-niobate optical-waveguide high speed modulator, 1.1-1.6micron avalanche photodiode detector, and duplex frequency-division- multiplexing coherent optical communications devices. * Various quantum-well optoelectronic devices. * Optoelectronic IC made domestically. * Superlattice growth of II-VI semiconductors and fabrication of optically bistable devices, bismuth-silicate spatial light modulator, molecular beam epitaxy growth of GaAs, and GaAs/Si LEDs and MESFETs have been fabricated. -----------------------END OF REPORT----------------------------------