TIANJIN - The Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-1A has become one of the world's fastest supercomputers to go into extensive use, the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin (NSCC-TJ), where the computer is housed, announced Monday.

With a performance of 2.57 petaflops per second (quadrillions of calculations per second), the Tianhe-1A took the top spot on a list of the world's 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems in November 2010, dropping to second place after being surpassed by a Japanese supercomputer in June 2011.

Liu Guangming, head of NSCC-TJ, said at a Monday press conference that the extensive applications of the Tianhe-1A indicate that China's ability to build useful supercomputers has reached a globally advanced level.

In the past year, the Tianhe-1A has been used for a variety of tasks related to oil exploration, bioengineering and medicine, animation and movie rendering, high-end equipment production design and geographic information systems as a result of NSCC-TJ shifting its focus toward the Tianhe-1A in November 2010.

To facilitate access to the Tianhe-1A, Meng Xiangfei, head of the applications department of the NSCC-TJ, said a cloud computing-based service has been developed for the supercomputer.

"The Tianhe-1A is an open platform and a result of China's innovative efforts. We would like to share it with the world," Meng said.