GUANGZHOU, July 9  - China's Tianhe-2, the world's fastest supercomputer, began an upgrade on Wednesday, said the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, in south China's Guangdong Province.

The upgrade will continue till the end of Aug. or early Sept. and increase overall computing speed from 54 to more than 100 petaflops per second, said Yuan Xuefeng, center director. It is still able to handle high levels of analyzing, computing and processing during the upgrade.

Tianhe-2 was developed by the National University of Defense Technology and has been in commercial operation since April.

In 2015, a hardware upgrade will start, after which the "super brain" is expected to be completely powered by domestically made chips.

Tianhe-2 occupied the top spot for the third time in the biannual Top500 list of supercomputers at the end of June. Its computing capacity in one hour equals that of the whole population of China using calculators for 1,000 years.