China is on its way to make a new indigenous supercomputer build with custom microprocessors developed at the Institute Of Computing Technology. This supercomputer, the petascale Dawning 6000 is a successor of the current fastest supercomputer China has, the Dawning 5000a. The Dawning 5000a has been running on AMD powered microprocessors and Windows HPC Server as it’s OS. The Dawning 5000a ranks 11th in the world. Apart from that, China also holds the #5 supercomputer in the top 500 list.

Surprisingly though, the Loongson processor family has been used on low power netbooks and similar miniature devices.This is a major step for the company and the chief architect of this family of processors Weiwu Hu is really looking forward to this. A fact that needs to be mentioned here is that this is not the first time Loongson has gotten hold of a deal for a supercomputer. It did get a deal for the Dawning 5000a but failed to deliver in time and also lacked support for Windows.

If everything goes as planned, the supercomputer would be ready by mid 2010 and running by later this year. The microprocessors have been fed with the MIPS instruction set which is widely popular in embedded systems.

This supercomputer will not be just another trophy for Linux, it will let us unleash the power of Linux, yet again.
And:

China Details Homemade Supercomputer Plans.

The machine will use an unfashionable chip design.

It's official: China's next supercomputer, the petascale Dawning 6000, will be constructed exclusively with home-grown microprocessors...
Link: Technology Review: China Details Homemade Supercomputer Plans