China will construct a new National Supercomputer Center in Zhengzhou, central China's Henan Province, the official newspaper of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) reports.

The seventh NSC in the country, Zhengzhou will be home to a 100 petaflops high-performance computing system.

Coming soon to a province near you

Located at Zhengzhou University, the project is expected to be finished in the first half of 2020.

No details were given as to the system's architecture, but due to trade restrictions and an internal effort to become 'self-controlled,' it will likely use home-grown technology.

China currently has three distinct pre-exascale prototype approaches, one using processors from Chinese chip-maker Hygon, another turning to Matrix-2000+ processors, and the third deploying older ShenWei 26010s.

“The goal is to build exascale computers with self-controllable technology, that's a kind of lesson we learned in the past. We just cannot be completely bound to external technology when we build our own system," Professor Qian Depei, chief scientist for the national R&D project on high performance computing in China, explained in our feature on the global race to build exascale supercomputers.

The Zhengzhou system will not be exascale, but will likely be used to prototype software planned for exascale systems.

MOST's paper, the Science and Technology Daily, reports that the new supercomputing center will develop applications in artificial intelligence, equipment manufacturing, precision medicine and biological breeding.

The other national supercomputer centers are in the cities of Tianjin, Jinan, Changsha, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Wuxi.