CHINA'S Tianhe-1 has taken top spot as the world's fastest computer, according to an industry announcementyesterday.

Housed at the National Center for Supercomputing in the northern port city of Tianjin, Tianhe-1, meaning Milky Way, has a sustained computing speed of 2,507 trillion calculations a second, or 2.507 petaflops per second?(PFlop/s). A petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations.

The system has a theoretical speed of 4.7 PFlop/s, according to a member of the research and development team for Tianhe-1.

Another Chinese system, Nebulae, housed in Shenzhen, is capable of a sustained computing speed of 1.271 PFlop/s on the Linpack benchmark, a measure for ranking supercomputers.

The US leads the world in supercomputing and is home to more than half of the top 500 supercomputers. Its fastest computer, the Jaguar system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a speed of 1.75 PFlop/s.

The Tianhe-1 has upgraded Intel central processing units New domestically developed FeiTeng-1000 CPUs have also been installed, the National University of