China is planning to top itself as a faster supercomputer is under construction. A representative of the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin announced on Friday that they will introduce a prototype of a supercomputer that is 1,000 times more powerful than its groundbreaking Tianhe-1A. 

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China is currently the home of the two fastest supercomputers in the world, the Tianhe-1A, introduced in 2010, and the Tianhe-2, introduced in 2013. Although the latter is faster, the former is more widely used. Currently, Tianhe-2 holds the title of being the fastest supercomputer in the world. 

"With its uses in oil exploration data management, animation and video effects, biomedical data processing and high-end equipment manufacturing, Tianhe-1A's capacity is being stretched," said Meng Xiangfei, a spokesperson for the National Supercomputer Center. 

The new supercomputer is scheduled to debut in 2017 or 2018 and is described as an "exascale" computer capable of at least a billion  calculations per second. Exascale is the next generation advancement in supercomputing technology. 

According to Meng, the Tianhe 1A is carrying out more than 1,400 computing tasks and is serving 1,000 users a day. 

"The prototype of this new supercomputer will show performance at 10 to 18 degrees of computational floating-point operations per second. Petaflops is a measure of a computer's processing speed and can be expressed as: A quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS)," Sputnik News reported. 

This is China's answer to a fast-rising demand for next generation computing. Running the latest applications on supercomputers is proving to be a challenge to computer scientists. 

TagsSupercomputer, Tianhe 1A, Tianhe-2, exascale, China technology