The Jinan Supercomputing Center Science and Technology Park began operations on May 9.

At the opening ceremony, the park signed cooperative agreements with leading companies, universities and high-end scientific research institutions in the field.

Huawei, Inspur, Haier, Lenovo, Tongji University, China Unicom Shandong branch, the Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth and the Ocean University of China were included.

Supported by the Shandong Academy of Sciences and the Jinan municipal government, the park covers an area of 21.87 hectares with an investment of 10.5 billion yuan ($1.56 billion).

The park will help promote the city's research and development in high-performance computing, cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence.

Jinan Mayor Sun Shutao said at the ceremony that the city attaches great importance to promoting its supercomputing sector.

The state-of-the-art E-class supercomputer with a speed of up to 10 quadrillion calculations per second has been in use since 2018. The supercomputing center is expected to build a quintillion-calculation computer in 2020.

The opening ceremony for the Jinan Supercomputing Center Science and Technology Park is held on May 9 in Jinan, East China's Shandong province. [Photo/e23.cn]

Sun Shutao,  mayor of Jinan, delivers a speech at the opening ceremony. [Photo/e23.cn]

The main building of the supercomputing center, with a construction area of about 110,000 square meters. [Photo/iqilu.com]