A Chinese supercomputer has been ranked as the second fastest in the world, indicating the country is becoming a major computing power as well as a political one.
The Nebulae system, located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhe, achieved 1.271 petaflops running the Linpack benchmark a measure of computing power. One petaflop is equivalent to one quadrillion calculations per second.
The Chinese machine was only beaten by the US-based Jaguar supercomputer, according to the Top 500 supercomputing list, which was released on Friday.
The Jaguar, which is located at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, achieved 1.75 petaflops.
In theoretical peak performance, the Nebulae can hit 2.98 petaflops, the highest figure ever reported on the Top 500 list and greater than the Jaguar's 2.3 petaflops potential.
The US is still the dominant force in the supercomputing world though, with 282 machines in the list compared to China's 24.
In Europe, the UK has the kept the top spot with 38 machines, although this is down from 45 when the last Top 500 was released six months ago. Germany is home to the fastest supercomputer in the continent - an IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer located at the Forschungszentrum Juelich that achieved 825.5 teraflops.
The quickest machine in the UK was the HECToR system, located at the University of Edinburgh.
Professor Arthur Trew, director of the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre at the Scottish university, said that it is unsurprising China has "aspirations to improve [its] industry".
"Obviously the Chinese have decided that this is a game that they want to play and that is just in the last few years, really just to give their industry a boost," he told IT PRO.
Professor Trew explained that the HECToR system has been involved in a multitude of projects, ranging from climate modelling and simulation of the Iceland volcano to aircraft component design.
He also noted that whatever happens in supercomputing will have a trickledown effect to standard desktop systems.
