Citing safety and security concerns following an industrial accident that killed more than 50 people and injured hundreds more in northeast China on Wednesday night, officials have shut down Tianhe-1A, the supercomputer that heralded China’s rise into the elite fold of supercomputing in 2010.

The machine is housed inside the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, on the campus of the National Defense Science and Technology University in the port city of Tianjin, about 75 miles southeast of Beijing. Located just a few kilometers from the deadly blast, the center endured violent shaking, resulting in cracked exterior walls, shattered glass windows and collapsed ceilings, according to mainland China media outlets.

News agencies Xinhua and South China Morning Post reported that the computer was not damaged and remains operational.

Liu Guangming, director of the center, told Xinhua that the computer was running smoothly after the massive blast ripped through a nearby warehouse where dangerous materials were stored. The supercomputer and its database remain intact,” said Liu.

The computer room is reinforced to protect the expensive equipment inside, however the staff of the center enacted a manual shut down half an hour after the blast as a further safeguard. The center’s website is also offline at the time of writing.

When the 2.57 petaflops (LINPACK) system first went online, backers said it would be used for petroleum exploration and aircraft design, and its designation as an “open access” computer meant it would also be used to service clients internationally. Currently, Tianhe-1A is said to provide data services to more than 300 organizations across China, including universities and banks. Another Chinese newspaper reports that the computer has primarily supported China’s space programs.

The significance of Tianhe-1A is multifold. Its debut as the world’s fastest supercomputer in November 2010 marked the first time that a Chinese supercomputer had that honor. The accomplishment also represented one of the earliest petascale machines and China’s second (after Nebulae).

Most of the initial petascale crop were heterogeneous machines, built with general purpose CPUs and specialized accelerators or coprocessors, and Tianhe-1A also employed this strategy with 14,336 Intel Xeon X5670 processors and 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs.

As Yang Xuejun, Tianhe-1A’s chief designer and a professor at the National University of Defense Technology, commented back in 2010: “the key to the high performance of Tianhe-1A is the hybrid architecture of the integration of the CPUs and GPUs (Graphics Processing Units).”

Tianhe-1A occupied the number one spot on the TOP500 list of fastest publicly-disclosed systems from October 2010 until June 2011, leaving a couple year span until China took top place again with Tianhe’s successor, Tianhe-2, in June 2013. “Tianhe” means “Milky Way” or, more literally, “Sky River.” Both machines were developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, based in Changsha.

The computer, which dropped to 24th place on the June 2015 TOP500 list, cost a reported $88 million to build and another $20 million is spent each year for electricity and operating expenses. The machine weighs 150 tons and covers an area of 1,000 square meters.

News agencies are reporting that there were two primary explosions, massive enough to be seen by satellites in space.

“The first one was equivalent to 3 tons of TNT,” NPR’s Frank Langfitt gleaned from Chinese sources. “The second: 21 tons. Satellite photos suggest a blast radius of nearly 2 miles.”

The cause of the deadly accident has yet to be ascertained but the warehouse where it occurred, named as Tianjin Dongjiang Port Rui Hai International Logistics Co. Ltd, housed toxic chemicals and other dangerous materials.

Explosion site in Tianjin, China — image credit: Reuters