A Chinese supercomputer is the top contender to be the world's fastest computer on the Top500 list, according to reports.

China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, also known as the Milkyway-2, reportedly measured at speeds of 30.65 petaflops surpassing the record holder the Titan by 74 percent.

"One petaflop is a thousand trillion or one followed by 15 zeroes number of operations per second," according to Times of India.

In order to make it on the Top500 list, a computer must undergo a five-hour Linpack test using 14,336 out of 16,000 compute nodes, or 90 percent of the machine, with 50 GB of memory of each node. The process was how testers measured 30.65 petaflops in the Tianhe-2.

The latest rankings will be issued as part of the twice-yearly Top500 list on June 17. When University of Tennessee Professor Jack Dongarra released the Tianhe-2's numbers in a paper, no mention was made if the results were submitted in time to be included on the list.

"Tianhe-2 will provide an open platform for research and education and provide high performance computing service for southern China," Dongarra wrote.

The Titan, a U.S. computer system, is the world's fastest computer as of the last Top500 list.  However, with the current tests the Tianhe-2 may take the lead.

"Scheduled to arrive in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou before the end of this year, Tianhe-2 is being assembled and tested at China's National University for Defense Technology (NUDT)," according to Ars Techinca.

Tianhe-2 is built with Intel Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi processors.

"There are 32,000 Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon sockets and 48,000 Xeon Phi boards for a total of 3,120,000 cores," Dongarra wrote.

"Tianhe-2 is the follow-up to Tianhe-1, which was #1 in the world in November 2010 and ranked eighth in the most recent list, with a speed of 2.57 petaflops," according to Ars Technica.