The China Meteorological Administration, or CMA inaugurated its new supercomputing center in the Horinger New Area in Hohhot – capital city of North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region – on May 20.

Costing 300 million yuan ($41.44 million), the center was completed in just 18 months and the supercomputing building itself took only 183 days from groundbreaking to starting up operations.

The Horinger supercomputing center aims to be highly sustainable, with up to 7 percent of its power coming from green energy sources, reducing carbon emissions by nearly 3,000 metric tons annually.

The supercomputing system boasts a peak performance of 20 PFlops and is connected to the CMA's headquarters via high-speed fiber optics.

Floating point operations per second – or FLOPS – is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations and a petaflop is 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

The new facility has already been utilized for numerical weather prediction services during the 14th National Winter Games hosted by Inner Mongolia, with core systems – such as the CMA's global numerical weather prediction models – currently undergoing testing.

Officials from the CMA, the autonomous region and local government departments attended the inauguration ceremony and toured the facility, gaining insights into the scale and capabilities of the new supercomputing system.