World's fastest supercomputer starts formal operations

The world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-2, began formal operations on Wednesday at the National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou in south China.

The supercomputer, capable of performing 33.86 petaflops per second (Pflop/s), was at the top of a Top 500 list ranking the world's fastest supercomputers, which was released at the SC13 supercomputing conference in Denver on Nov. 18.

Developed by the National University of Defense Technology in June, the supercomputer was shipped to Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, in September and installed and tested for more than a month, according to sources with the supercomputing center.

Tianhe-2, which means "Milky Way-2" in English, has been successfully tested in various applications, such as weather forecast, commercial airplane design, and gene sequencing, the center said.

It is almost twice as fast as the next computer on the list, the U.S. Department of Energy's Titan, which has a performance of 17.59 Pflop/s.