--FILE--The Tianhe-1A supercomputer is seen at the National Supercomputer Center in T?ianjin, China, 30 September 2010. China has introduced the worlds fastest supercomputer, asserting itself as a global technology power. The creation of the machine called Tianhe-1A thus supplants the U.S. as the creator of the most powerful machine. Tianhe, which means milky way, was created at a research center at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Tianjin, China. According to a New York Times report, the machine is 1.4 times faster than Cray XT5 Jaguar, the now second fastest supercomputer that is housed at a Tennessee national lab. The system weighs 155 tons and has 103 cabinets that cover 1, 000 square meters. Tianhe-1As record speed is reached using 14, 336 Intel Xeon CPUs and 7, 168 Nvidia Tesla GPUs. NUDT said that the computers peak performance can hit 1.206 petaflops and runs at 563.1 teraflops using the Linpack benchmark developed by University of Tennessee computer scientist Jack Dongarra. Nvidia, however, said the machine set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops. Created by 200 computer scientists over two years, Tianhe-1A cost US$88 million and consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity. NUDT said it will be used to process seismic data for oil exploration, conduct biomedical computing, and to help design aerospace vehicles.