"The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Japanese supercomputer dashes past competition It's a machine so fast it performs more computations per second than there are stars in our galaxy. It's so large it's housed in a building the size of an aircraft hangar.
Running 35.6 trillion calculations per second, the Earth Simulator is the fastest supercomputer in the world, almost five times faster than the next best one and as fast as the top five U.S. supercomputers combined."...
"IBM, flush with a $290 million government contract to build two supercomputers, says it will regain the No. 1 title in 2004 with a 100-teraflop machine that would be nearly three times faster than Earth Simulator.
Seattle-based Cray has won a $90 million contract to build a supercomputer for nuclear-weapons simulations at Sandia National Laboratory, also by 2004. And it has taken on a government challenge to create, by 2010, a computer that will be measured in petaflops — 1,000 trillion calculations per second."
The supercomputer leapfrog game continues...