"Personally I love it," Jeremy Smith, director of director of the Center for Molecular Biophysics at Oak Ridge, said of the international attention now being paid to supercomputing. "In competing with other countries everybody gains and wins - that's why I'm excited about it."

The global attention may raise the profile of supercomputing and help keep government interest in funding it. When Japan's Earth Simulator emerged as the world's fastest computer in 2002, it "shocked the supercomputing world," Smith said.

The National Research Council, in a report soon after the Japan achieved the top ranking, said that Japan's system "has served as a wake-up call, reminding us that complacency can cause us to lose not only our competitive advantage but also, and more importantly, the national competence that we need to achieve our own goals."

But the Japanese system was a one-time occurrence. China, in contrast, has embarked on a sustained drive to not only build world leading systems, but its own processors and interconnecting technologies for high-performance systems as well.

Japan is still building supercomputers, but its major disclosed project is a 10-petaflop system, nicknamed the "K computer." It's being developed by Fujitsu for use by High-Performance Computing Infrastructure Initiative by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and is due in 2012.