China builds world's fastest supercomputer

The TOP500’s semiannual official listing of the world’s fastest computers revealed China’s Tianhe-2 as number one, dethroning the US Department of Energy’s Titan, the Associated Press reported. The Tianhe-2, or Milky Way-2, has computing speeds almost twice as fast as its US counterpart. The machine was developed by the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, Hunan province and is capable of 33,860 trillion computations, or 33.86 petaflops, per second. The US Titan can sustain 17.59 petaflops per second. Most of Tianhe-2’s features were developed domestically, apart from Intel parts used for main computing processes, underscoring China’s technolgoical rise.