The Shanghai government supercomputer center said yesterday it would upgrade due to rapidly growing demand.

It is also competing with other centers to win a national competition to build the world’s fastest supercomputer.

“Our speed has fallen behind China and the world because supercomputing is developing so fast,” said center director Zhou Ximin.

“It is not enough to cope with the increasing demand and many of our clients need to wait in queues now. Some just turn to other centers.”

The center was built in December, 2000, as the first high performance computing platform in China.

It was built to support research in industries, universities and institutes.

The Shanghai Supercomputer Center was the fastest in Asia and 10th fastest in the world in 2015 running 230 trillion calculations per second.

It is also competing with other provinces and cities for a national program to build a supercomputer that can calculate a billion billion times per second.

The first supercomputer center — the earliest by eight years — mainly serves leading universities, research institutes and companies all over China.

These include the Shanghai Jiao Tong and Fudan Universities, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China and the SAIC Motor Corporation.

But, increasingly, medium-sized companies are using it.

“Supercomputers are very important in our lives and to the efforts of building Shanghai into a global innovation center for science and technology,” Zhou said.

“It can not only increase the accuracy of prediction and design, such as weather forecasts, but it also save costs for companies.

“And even stimulate experiments that are impossible to carry out in the real world.”