Chinese National Supercomputing Center supercomputer Tianhe 1A broke the world supercomputer processing speed record for the first time, it was announced last week. At over 2.5 petaflops (2.5 thousand trillian calculations per second), it can run almost twice as fast as the Jaguar, a Cray-built supercomputer housed at the Oka Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and is powered by 14,336 Intel Xeon processors and 7,168 NVidia graphics processors. Tianhe 1A brings China to the top of the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers from its previous second place, swapping places with the US, whose Jaguar had held the position since November of last year.