China retains supercomputer crown in latest Top500 list

A supercomputer built by the Chinese government has retained its place at the top of a list of the world's most powerful systems. Tianhe-2 can operate at 33.86 petaflop/s - the equivalent of 33,863 trillion calculations per second - according to a test called the Linpack benchmark.

Tianhe-2 - which translates as Milky Way 2 - was developed by China's National University of Defence Technology and will be based in the city of Guangzhou, in the country's south-eastern Guandong province.It uses a mixture of processors made by Intel as well as custom-made CPUs designed by the university itself.

The system is to be offered as a "research and education" tool once tests are completed, with local reports suggesting that officials have picked the car industry as a "priority" client.

Its Linpack score is nearly double that of the next supercomputer in the list - Titan, the US Department of Energy's system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The Top500 list is compiled twice-yearly by a team led by a professor from Germany's University of Mannheim. It measures how fast the computers can solve a special type of linear equation to determine their speed, but does not take account of other factors - such as how fast data can be transferred from one part of the system to another - which can also influence real-world performance.

IBM - which created five out of the 10 fastest supercomputers in the latest list - told the BBC it believed the way the list was calculated should now be updated, and would press for the change at a conference being held this week in Denver, Colorado.