China develops supercomputer

China unveiled its fastest supercomputer yesterday, which at its peak speed can do more than one quadrillion calculations per second, known as a petaflop.

The birth of the supercomputer, named "Tianhe", which means "Milky Way", makes China the second country, after the United States, to build a petaflop computer. This gigantic device can do as many calculations in one day as those done by an ordinary dual-core personal computer in 160 years, said Li Nan, director of the Tianhe Project Office under the National University of Defense Technology, developer of the supercomputer.

Tianhe, at a cost of 600 million yuan ($88 million), ranks first on China's Top 100 supercomputer list released in Changsha, capital of Hunan Province, with a theoretical peak performance of 1.206 petaflops and a Linpack performance of 560 teraflops.