Oak Ridge National Laboratory, home for what has been the world's most powerful system, the , versus Tianhe-1A's 2.5 petaflops, is building a 20-petaflop system that will include accelerators.

That system will be ready in 2012, James Hack, director of the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge, told Computerworld. No other details about the system are being offered.

Another 20- system is being built for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by . That system has already been announced and is expected to arrive at the lab in late 2011 and be in production in 2012.

The earliest it is likely to be ready for consideration in the list will be for the June 2012 release of the ranking, said Don Johnston, a spokesman for Lawrence Livermore labs.

Whether these 20-petaflop systems emerge as the top systems in the world remains to be seen, but with in building its own systems, supercomputing is becoming intensely globally competitive.