The Chinese Sunway BlueLight supercomputer, which was built with China-produced microprocessors and is capable of performing around 1,000-trillion calculations per second, has officially gone into operation at the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Jinan, east China's Shandong Province.

The supercomputer was installed in September 2011 and underwent a three-month-long trial operation period before going into official use, making China the third country in the world to be capable of producing supercomputers using domestically developed processors after the United States and Japan.

Consisting of nine 3-meter-high boxes and equipped with a total of 8,704 Shenwei 1600 microprocessors, the Sunway BlueLight is among the 20 fastest supercomputers in the world.

Developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology, the Sunway BlueLight incorporates high-density packaging and low energy consumption technologies. It will be used to help increase the accuracy of climate simulations conducted by Chinese scientists and assist them in ocean circulation monitoring.