China has built the world's fastest supercomputer, almost twice as fast as the previous U.S. holder and underlining the country's rise as a science and technology powerhouse.
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The semiannual TOP500 official listing of the world's fastest supercomputers released Monday says the Tianhe-2 developed by the National University of Defense Technology in central China's Changsha city is capable of sustained computing of 33.86 petaflops per second. That's the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second.