SX-9 : Japan's NEC boasts the world's most powerful computer - 839 Teraflops

Japan's NEC Corp. on Thursday announced the launch of what it called the world's most powerful supercomputer on the market, meant for advanced use in the sciences.

Since the 1970s, major computer makers such as NEC, Fujitsu and Hitachi in Japan and IBM, Intel and SGI in the United States have been vying to build the most powerful computer, measured in terms of gigaflops and teraflops.

NEC said that its latest supercomputer, called SX-9, is capable of calculating 839 teraflops -- or 839 trillion floating point operations per second.

"The SX-9 has been developed to meet the need for ultra-fast simulations of advanced and complex large-capacity scientific computing," Yoshikazu Maruyama, senior vice president of NEC Corp., said in a statement.

NEC's supercomputers are used in fields including advanced weather forecasting, aerospace and in large research institutes and companies.

The company said it has already sold more than 1,000 supercomputers in the SX series.

The SX-9 will first go on display at a supercomputing convention next month in Reno, Nevada.