On this day, 29 years ago, on December 2, 1996 (October 22, 1996 in the lunar calendar), supercomputers were introduced in the United States. On December 2, 1996, Intel Corporation of the United States recently developed the world's fastest supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy, with a capacity of 1.4 trillion calculations per second, breaking the trillion calculations per second mark for the first time in the history of supercomputer development. Researchers said that the computer cost $55 million to develop and can complete computing tasks in 15 seconds that take 250,000 yuan for written calculations and 2 days for personal computers to run. The fastest supercomputer before was developed by Japan's Hitachi Corporation in 1995. It runs at a speed of 368 billion times per second, while Intel's supercomputer is three times faster. The supercomputer, developed for the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, will be used primarily to simulate nuclear experiments, weather and natural disaster forecasting, genetic research, space simulation experiments and other data-intensive research.