(Yicai Global) May 14 -- The capital of China's central Henan province will build the country's seventh national supercomputer center to support the industrial transformation of this major agricultural region. 

The science and technology ministry has approved Zhengzhou's plan, the Henan Daily reported today. Zhengzhou University will lead the development and running of the new center, which is expected to be completed in the first half of next year.

At peak capacity the hub's new-generation supercomputers will reach 100 petaflops, a standard unit to measure computer performance, and have 100 petabytes of storage capacity, hopefully ranking among the world's top 10.

China already has six national supercomputing centers: one each in the cities of Tianjin, Changsha, Jinan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Wuxi. The Sunway TaihuLight, developed by the Wuxi facility in 2016, ranked third in the global supercomputer list last year with a peak performance of 125 petaflops.

Short for floating point operations per second, petaflops measure a computer's ability to do one quadrillion floating point operations a second. A petabyte equals one quadrillion bytes.

The Zhengzhou center will carry out applied research on artificial intelligence, equipment manufacturing, precision medicine and biological reproduction, according to officials at the local department of science and technology. It will also be a base and training center with national influence, providing robust computing power for the province's industrial makeover, they added.