A list issued by United States and European researchers ranked a Chinese supercomputer as the second fastest machine in the world.

The supercomputer is also known as the Nebulae system, located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China. It is capable of computing 1.271 petaflops or 1,271 trillion calculations per second. It came in second to the United States Department of Energy’s Jaguar, located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which is capable of computing 1.75 petaflops.

Nowadays, supercomputers are used for doing complex tasks such as designing jetliners, modeling weather systems, astrophysics research and simulating nuclear explosions.

Europe had 144 machines on the list, including the one in United Kingdom, which is found at the University of Edinburgh.

The top 500 list was still dominated by the U.S. as more than half of the spots were filled by U.S. supercomputers. China, on the other hand, had 24.

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