China designs supercomputer

EDIT CONTAINS 4:3 MATERIAL

A supercomputer made in China has been named the world's fastest of its kind, and runs almost twice as fast as the previous U.S. record holder.

The TOP 500 list, which is complied by a group of international experts and ranks supercomputers worldwide twice a year, showed in its latest version on Monday (June 17) that China-built Tianhe-2, meaning Milky Way-2 in English, is capable of operating at 33.86 petaflops per second, the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second.

Designed and built by the National University of Defence Technology in central China's Changsha city and sponsored by the government, Tianhe-2 knocked Titan, designed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, off the top spot on the Linpack benchmark.

Titan computes at 17.59 petaflops per second.

Tianhe-2, which cost 100 million U.S. dollars, is expected to be put into use later this year, state television CCTV said.