BY the end of next year the city will have built a high-performance computing center (HPC) holding "super computers" that can make 1 quadrillion that's with 15 zeros calculations per second.

It is a key project underlined in the city's comprehensive reform plans, which have been approved by the Central Government, and the biggest State-level science infrastructure in the city so far.

The center will be located near Shenzhen University Town in Nanshan District, Xu Qin, executive vice mayor of Shenzhen, said at a news conference Thursday.

The Ministry of Science and Technology will invest 200 million yuan (US$29 million) on the 790-million-yuan project, while the rest will be covered by Shenzhen.

The calculating ability of super computers is equivalent to 200,000 laptops. For example, an ordinary computer would need 20 years to analyze the meteorological data from the past 30 years, while it only takes one hour for super computers to finish the job, according to a report provided at the news conference.

Upon completion, the center will be used for providing public information services such as weather forecasts for the southern mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

A recent survey found that the computing power needed in Shenzhen and neighboring cities was 800 trillion times per second, while Hong Kong and Macao need computers that can calculate 300 trillion times per second.

It can also provide high-performance computing and data processing for enterprises and assist in scientific research.

"The center will promote the integration of Shenzhen and Hong Kong in innovation," said Fan Jianping, director of the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "Hong Kong universities will collaborate with the center in many fields, such as the rice gene program."

Apart from weather forecasting, Fan said the super computers could help in the fields of new energy, new materials, natural disaster forecasting and city planning.

For instance, the computers could help in analyzing whether air pollution in other places would affect the weather in Shenzhen or what effect a tsunami in Indonesia would have on the Pearl River Delta, Fan said.

Xu said the high-performance computing center would help improve Shenzhen's competitiveness in scientific innovation.

Super computers are widely applied in national defense and civil engineering in the United States, Japan and Europe.

There are presently two super computers in the world that can compute a quadrillion times per second.