China overtakes U.S. with world's most powerful supercomputer

The Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been at the top of the list for a year, but has now been overtaken by Tianhe-1A, which was built by China's National University of Defense Technology and is located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Tianjin. Tianhe-1A achieved a performance level of 2.67 petaflops per second while Jaguar achieved 1.75 petaflop/s. Third place went to another Chinese-built system, called Nebulae, which registered 1.27 petaflop/s.

While the news of China's achievement is not exactly a surprise, the supercomputing community in the US is looking at it two ways: as an assurance that US software and components are still elite in their field, and as a wake-up call that the country's prestige in high-performance computing is not a given.

For more on this story, read China unseats U.S. in supercomputer ranking on CNET News.