Chinese Comp Does 1000 tn Operations a Second

China has installed the country's first domestically-made supercomputer capable of doing 1,000 trillion operations per second. Tianhe-1 is scheduled to begin operations this month, according to the National Supercomputing Centre in Tianjin.

The supercomputer, developed by the National University of Defence Technology in 2009, enabled China to become only the second country after the US capable of developing a device with a speed of 1,000 trillion operations per second. 

Tianhe-1 was ranked fifth on the list of the Top-500 supercomputers in November 2009, The People's Daily reported on Thursday. One second of calculations by Tianhe-1 is equivalent to 88 years of calculations by 1.3 billion people, and the data the supercomputer can store is equivalent to the total collections in four libraries with 27 million books each.

Tianhe-1 will be used for animation, biomedical research, aerospace equipment development, resource exploration, satellite remote sensing data and weather forecasts.