For decades, China's aid to the African continent has made lasting differences in infrastructure, education and medical services. But when China handed over a supercomputer center to Zimbabwe in 2015, it opened a new door for China-Africa cooperation. Tang Bo has the story.

36 trillion times per second, the 2nd strongest computing capacity in Africa. This supercomputer belongs to the Zimbabwe Center for High Performance Computing, or HPC. It is China's first high technology aid to Africa, making Zimbabwe the continent's fifth country to own a supercomputer.

WILLE GANDA RDI DIRECTOR, ZIMBABWEAN MINISTRY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY DEV'T "Our system is very new, the second largest one in Africa, and it has got much more sophisticated equipment. It's also the most distributed system in Africa. All universities in this country use the system."

Built with interest-free loans from China, the computing center is located on the campus of the University of Zimbabwe. It processes research for bioscience, education, meteorology and other departments. The computing center currently has over 400 active users, and the number is increasing.

PANASHE CHIURUNGE HPC USER & CHIEF DATA SCIENTIST, DEEP ANALYTICS "For us to be able to create a machine learning model, it takes weeks or even month of training. But now with the help of the HPC, that process takes only a couple of hours to test our model, and makes our work more productive."

The computer's manufacturer, China's Inspur Group has decided to help build the second phase of the project, with a computing capacity nearly 10 times the size of phase one.

ZHANG YIFEI DEPUTY DIRECTOR, INSPUR GROUP, ZIMBABWE OFFICE "For the second phase, the computer's operational capability will increase from 36 teraflops per second to over 300. Many new technologies will be introduced as well such as cloud services and cloud computing."

The second phase will also provide the Zimbabwean government with technical support on its decision-making process.

DR. RAY NDHLUKULA DEP. CHIEF SECRETARY, ZIMBABWEAN OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT & CABINET "When you look at the HPC, it's all about national development, and we are now focusing on utilizing new technology for national development instead of traditional industries where things have been done manually. We believe that China is helping Africa accelerate its development by using modern technology, this is most welcomed."

TANG BO HARARE "The Chinese ambassador to Zimbabwe says that the supercomputer project is one of the successful examples of the bilateral economic cooperation. It further signifies that China's aid to Africa is now going from the areas of traditional industries to that of the advanced technologies. And that has opened a brand new area for future China-Africa cooperation. Tang Bo, CGTN, Harare, Zimbabwe."