A Chinese supercomputer has topped a list of the world’s fastest computers for the seventh straight year – and for the first time the winner uses Chinese-designed processors instead of U.S. technology. The Sunway TaihuLight at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, was developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology using Chinese-designed processors. The TaihuLight is capable of 93 petaflops, or quadrillion calculations per second, according to TOP500. Its top speed is about five times that of No 3-ranked Oak Ridge’s Titan, which uses Cray, NVIDIA and Opteron technology. The TaihuLight uses Chinese-developed Shenwei processors, “ending any remaining speculation that China would have to rely on Western technology to compete effectively in the upper echelons of supercomputing,” TOP500 said in a statement.The second-fastest computer, the Tianhe-2 at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, is capable of 33 petaflops, using chips made by Intel Corp.

China also displaced the U.S. as the country with the most supercomputers in the top 500. It had 167 systems, compared with 165 from the U.S. Japan was No 3 with 29 systems. Supercomputers are used for specialized purposes that include weather forecasting, nuclear weapons design, and analyzing oilfields. “Considering that just 10 years ago, China claimed a mere 28 systems on the list, with none ranked in the top 30, the nation has advanced further and faster than any other country in the history of supercomputing,” the TOP500 organizers said in a statement. Jack Dongarra, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee and editor of the list, told Xinhua News Agency: “It’s a trend with China. They had no systems in 2001, and today they surpass the United States. No other nation has seen such rapid growth.”