China is developing a new supercomputer and plans to launch it by June 2018, according to a team that already helped launch the world's fastest computer two years in a row. 

The Sunway exascale prototype computing machine is being developed by the National Supercomputing Center (NSC) in Jinan, east China's Shandong province, and the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (NRCPC).

When finished, it will execute a quintillion calculations per second - around eight times faster than the NRCPC's Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which was deemed the world's fastest computer at both the 2016 and 2017 International Supercomputing Conferences in Frankfurt, Germany - the research center said. 

Tianhe-2 was the world's fastest supercomputer in 2013. /VCG Photo

The NSC and NRCPC are working together on research and development for the new supercomputer, which has already gone into production in Jinan.

According to the developers, the new computer will be tasked with supporting further research and scientific applications in fields such as marine environments, biological information as well as aviation and aerospace.

Sunway TaihuLight is a China-developed supercomputer. /VCG Photo

Supercomputers play an important role in computational science, and can be used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in fields such as weather forecasting, climate research, space science and oceanology.

China and the United States are currently leading supercomputer development in the world. China has already introduced several prototype supercomputers, such as Sunway TaihuLight, Tianhe-1 and Tianhe-2.

(With inputs from Xinhua)