To allow application software vendors and enterprise customers in Hong Kong to benchmark their wares, and to enable CityU colleagues to carry out highly CPU intensive work or research projects, the University and Sun Microsystems have established a HK$20 million worth Enterprise Competency Centre (ECC).

The ECC is housed inside the Computing Services Centre (CSC) and equipped with an E10000, a supercomputer class of machine with 24 top-of-the-line 400 MHz UltraSparc CPUs with a total processing power of 19.2 Gflops. It also comes with 6GB memory and 460 GB disk space. Half of the machine is reserved for CityUs’ general academic and research purposes, and the other half for software vendors to demonstrate proof-of-concept and to run application performance benchmarks.

An Opening Ceremony was held on 12 April 2000 to mark the launch of the ECC. Being the first of its kind in the tertiary institutes in Hong Kong, the ECC attracted much attention from major local newspapers, radios, TVs as well as international journals and the Internet. The favourable comments from the media denoted a good start for the collaboration between the University and the commercial sector, and we believe the ECC will prove its standing as time shows.