The demand for special steel in the highend manufacturing industry poses a great challenge to the development and upgrading of special steel. The trial-and-error method can avoid the limitation of unknown physical mechanism on some problems, but it also takes a large amount of both time and cost of designing. So the development mode of special steel needs to gradually transform from traditional trial-and-error method to high flux integrated computing design. Since the advent of the materials genome initiative (MGI), many countries in the world have been carrying out highthroughput calculation and design of special steel to shorten the research and development cycle of new steels. However, the complicated composition, long chain of process, multi-phase structure and various properties make it difficult to apply MGI on traditional special steels. Based on the above characteristics, it also provided new challenges for the development of MGI. The progress in research and development of special steels based on MGI was reviewed. The development status and prospect of MGI for special steel materials were discussed. Olson‘s team in Northwestern University and Questek company designed the ultra-high strength stainless steel for aircraft landing gear using multi-scale integrated computing platform. TU Delft university designed the heat-resistant steel based on combining “genome” concept with genetic algorithm of high throughput design. India CSIR national metallurgical laboratory designed the pipeline steel by a variety of constitutive models and artificial neural network algorithms. High-throughput calculation and design can not only facilitate the updating of special steel, but also provide supports for the rapid development of metal materials in China and even worldwide.