WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 (UPI) -- American intelligence agencies announced plans Friday to develop and build a new superconducting supercomputer, one which would increase current computing capacity while simultaneously reducing the energy consumption and physical footprint of the machines.

Currently the record for single computer speed is China's Tianhe-2, ranked the world's fastest with a record of 33.86 petaFLOPS in June of 2013 (a petaFLOP being equal to one thousand million calculations per second).

The record for distributed computing speed — using a network of linked computers to boost processing — is also held by China: Its 55-petaFLOP Milky Way 2, using the BOINC infrastructure, computes at 471 teraFLOPS as of July, 2014.


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