This Day, That Year

Item from Nov 17, 1983, in China Daily: China's first large-scale vector computer system, capable of handling 10 million operations a second, has been approved by a national appraisal committee. The computer system was developed by the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in collaboration with more than 80 other units throughout the country.

Thanks to decades of research and development, China has become the global leader in supercomputers, which play an important role in many fields including quantum mechanics, weather forecasting and climate studies.

In the latest list released by the supercomputer tracking organization TOP500, the country accounted for 202 of the world's highest performance machines, while the United States had 143.