Future Technologies

BEIJING –   China has built the world's fastest computer for a second time, beating the U.S.'s Titan machine. The semiannual TOP500 official listing of the world's fastest supercomputers says the Tianhe-2 developed by the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha city in central China is capable of sustained computing of 33.86 petaflops per second . That's the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second . The list was released Monday. The Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, knocks the US Department of Energy’s Titan machine off the No. 1 spot. It achieved 17.59 petaflops per second. It's the second time China has been named as having built the world's fastest supercomputer. In 2010, predecessor Tianhe-1A gained that honor. Supercomputers are used for complex work such as modeling weather systems, simulating nuclear explosions and designing jetliners.