In the latest ranking, , the Tianjin National Supercomputer Center's Tianhe-1A system benchmarked a performance of 2.67 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), surpassing the former top achiever, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's Cray XT5 Jaguar system, which clocked in at 1.75 petaflops in this round.

China's ascendancy to the head of the Top500.org list seems to be sudden: Word of this new system . Its placement ends a six-year run on the top of the list by the U.S., which started when the DOE's IBM BlueGene/L system stole the top spot from Japan's Earth Simulator system, built by NEC. The Earth Simulator system itself was the on the part of the U.S. Congress, which set aside money for the DOE to build systems that would re-establish the country's lead in high-performance computing.

China's growing prominence on this list will cause a similar reaction. With 42 systems on the list, China has become the second-most-prominent country here, though it still trails by a large margin the U.S., which has 275 systems. Last June, China had only 24 systems on the list.

"Governments around the world are recognizing the deployment of this technology is a prerequisite to sustaining economic competitiveness," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing for IBM. "It lets you do better product designs, basic research, life sciences, fundamental research in materials."