The world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-2, began formal operations on November 20 at the National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou in south China's Guangdong Province.

The supercomputer, capable of achieving 33.86 petaFLOPS, ranked number one on the TOP500, a list ranking the world's fastest supercomputers, which was updated at the SC13 supercomputing conference in Denver, the United States, on November 18. FLOPS stands for Floating Point Operation per Second, one floating point operation simply being one calculation, where as one petaFLOPS is equivalent to one quadrillion such calculations per second.

Developed by China's National University of Defense Technology in June, the supercomputer was shipped to Guangzhou in September and installed and tested for more than a month, according to sources working with the supercomputing center.

Tianhe-2, which translates to Milky Way-2 in English, has been successfully tested for various applications, such as weather simulations and gene sequencing, the center said.

It is almost twice as fast as the next computer on the list, the U.S. Department of Energy's Titan, which was clocked as performing 16.59 petaFLOPS.