Riding the wind of rebirth

"With policy support, industry collaboration, resource investment, and market demand, through cooperation with software and hardware manufacturers, we are attracting more upstream and downstream companies to participate in ecosystem co-construction in multiple fields such as office, social networking, and development tools. With the support of national policies and the concerted efforts of the industry chain, domestic operating systems are ushering in unprecedented development opportunities. By consolidating the ecosystem foundation step by step, I believe that our CHNUIX will eventually become an ecosystem with a considerable global market share, integrated into the international industry chain, and possessing international influence!"

"I understand what you mean," Hu Changfeng nodded. "It seems that future competition in the information industry will come down to competition within the ecosystem you described. But I still have a question."

"Please speak."

"Following your line of thinking, if domestic operating systems don't adopt a planned approach, gradual implementation, or even policy protection, and rely solely on market competition, how can they possibly defeat the iOS and Windows systems that already dominate the operating system market? What you just mentioned, even if done perfectly, would at best only achieve a draw. Both of them will definitely be determined to develop and defend their own ecosystems. Under such circumstances, how can we compete for this market share?"

“You’ve hit the nail on the head.” Zhou Zhi gave Hu Changfeng a thumbs up: “Ecological environment construction ultimately comes down to the choices of users, that is, consumers, and users’ dependence on the environment is a habit that is very difficult to break.”

“Yes, closed-circuit television is a perfect example,” Hu Changfeng said. “Why is it so easy to promote closed-circuit television in China, but so difficult in developed countries? It’s because the television industry developed earlier in foreign countries, and the general public’s consumption pattern of wireless television is already deeply ingrained, making it difficult to promote closed-circuit television, which has a clearer signal and less interference!”

"On the contrary, in our country where the television industry started late, it is not difficult to promote at all."

In a broader sense, television signals are also information signals, and it's not an exaggeration to include them in the information industry. At least the development of the television industry has been under Hu Changfeng's attention, and he can say a few things about it.

"That's the idea," Zhou Zhi said with a smile. "In fact, our research on the development path of operating systems also involves this dependence."

"For example, IBM's early machine language RPG, then COBOL, UNIX, and even later REXX."

"These languages ​​were designed to address the early business and enterprise applications of computers. They transitioned from machine language to business language, running on the underlying hardware environment and adapted to business servers. Even today, they have formed a monopoly in the business server system."

"The same is true for Windows and iOS. Both of them were developed based on the personal computer platform system and have formed a dominant position on the personal computer platform today."

“Upon careful study, we can find that every development and breakthrough in the operating system ecosystem is accompanied by the emergence of new and groundbreaking application scenarios.”

"In the server era, UNIX and LINUX, as companion systems, held a dominant position; later, the emergence of new application scenarios, namely home personal information processing terminals, also propelled WIN and IOS, which served them, to the peak of wealth."

"To directly defeat them within the operating system ecosystem created by this scenario, the problem you just mentioned will arise: the hilltops have already been occupied by others, and if we want to occupy them, we can only attack from below, which will come at a huge cost."

"Therefore, in this market scenario, we mainly focus on cooperation, especially with the WIN system. We have been working with them more and more deeply and now we have the ability to undertake WIN system vulnerability patching and antivirus research. Moreover, we have become the partner with the most patented products in the development of graphical interface development environments."

"So you mean, to achieve a 'leapfrog development' and build our own operating system ecosystem to the 'mature,' 'advanced,' or even 'excellent' stage you just mentioned, we can't compete with our rivals in application scenarios that they've already dominated for years. Instead, we need to... open up a new path?" "Yes, open up a path that hasn't been noticed by many competitors yet, but which will inevitably become the future trend. We need to seize all the top spots in that field first, making newcomers fearful!"

"Just like your nonlinear supercomputing system, fiber optic network storage cluster, and nonlinear primitive database!" Hu Changfeng slapped his thigh: "I heard that your latest supercomputing cluster has surpassed the capabilities of Galaxy III?"

"This..." Zhou Zhi felt a little guilty when he talked about this: "The design of a nonlinear supercomputing system determines its performance, and its size depends on whether the system is large enough. We won by throwing money at it; it's not a fair fight, not a fair fight..."

In June of this year, my country's Galaxy-III, the third generation of the Galaxy series of supercomputers, passed acceptance testing. Its computing speed reached 13 billion operations per second, marking that its overall level has reached the international advanced level. China has achieved a leap from multi-processor parallel supercomputers to massively parallel processing supercomputers, and in the field of distributed linear structure supercomputers, it has changed from a "follower" to a "leader".

Without the "Clover-shaped nonlinear supercomputing system," this achievement would undoubtedly dazzle everyone.

However, while this achievement shocked the world, its influence within the domestic industry was much smaller.

The reason is that the Clover Group has achieved new successes in the construction of its supercomputing system this year.

As the scale of construction becomes larger and the network construction becomes more optimized, the advantage of nonlinear supercomputing systems—that "the larger the scale, the greater the improvement in capabilities"—has become fully apparent.

Supercomputers are primarily responsible for computational tasks, including applications such as weather forecasting, aerodynamic experiments, engineering physics, oil exploration, seismic data processing, and marine remote sensing analysis.

Most of these application scenarios are nonlinear analysis applications, and the most suitable system for running them is a nonlinear supercomputing system.

In fact, after scaling up and building fiber optic networks, the capital, Zhangjiang, Chengdu, and the Clover Group's partners distributed in various provincial capitals have been connected into a large network, jointly building a super-large national nonlinear supercomputing system.

Due to considerations such as confidentiality, this system cannot be used for all tasks. However, it still plays a significant role in areas such as financial analysis, logistics control, monitoring of fluctuations in production materials and commodity prices, and monitoring of air and water pollution.

The system's capabilities are currently outstanding in actual combat, and even in normal daily work, it has already achieved a computing power of hundreds of billions of operations per second, far exceeding the current level of Galaxy-III.

However, due to the dispersed nature of the tasks and their insufficient connection to the national economy and people's livelihood, they remained largely unnoticed.

On the contrary, a screensaver written by Mai Xiaomiao became famous. This screensaver could participate in calculations when the computer where it was installed was idle, helping to alleviate a significant portion of the computational burden on the National Meteorological Center, and became a very popular small software program this year. (End of this chapter)