China's first indigenously made computer, which can handle 1000 trillion floating point operations per second, has become functional and is being used for system debugging and testing.

Earlier this year, the first device of Tianhe-1, a computer system capable of reaching peak performance of 1,000 trillion floating point operations per second, was put into operation at the National Supercomputing Centre in Tianjin.

The computer containing 13 cabinets is now providing 24-hour remote network applications and running in good condition, official 'People's Daily' reported today.

After the petaflop computer system is completed, the calculation tasks will be transferred to the petaflop system.

Currently, the number of users of the National Supercomputing Centre in Beijing and Tianjin is gradually increasing.

With high-performance CPU chips, the system's overall processing power has increased substantially and its information security is receiving more technological guarantees, the report said.

Tianhe-1 was developed by the Changsha-based National University of Defence Technology in 2009, making China the world's second country capable of developing petaflop supercomputers after the United States. It was ranked fifth on the list of the Top-500 supercomputers issued in November 2009.

One second of calculations conducted by Tianhe-1 is equivalent to 88 consecutive years of calculations by 1.3 billion people. The data that the supercomputer can store is equivalent to the sum of the collections in four national libraries with 27 million books each, the report said.

Tianhe-1 will mainly be used for animation rendering, biomedical research, aerospace equipment development, processing of resource exploration and satellite remote sensing data, data analysis for financial engineering, weather forecasts, new materials development and design and theoretical calculation.