During the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC2005) in Heidelberg, Germany, the 25th top 500 fastest computer list was released. See http://www.top500.org
United States leads in fastest computers. The top three fastest computers are in the United States. United States has 18 out of the top 25 supercomputers in the list. Most of the world fastest supercomputers were built by I.B.M.
In the United States, Cray, I.B.M., and Sun Microsystems have been developing computers of fetaflop level by the end of the decade. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion mathematical operations a second. At present, fastest computer speed is measured by teraflop that is one trillion mathematical operation a second.
China now has 19 supercomputers of the top 500. China is moving fast to be in the first tier country. Lenova Group in China which bought I.B.M.'s personal computer business, said that it would build a petaflop computer by 2020. Other two Chinese computer companies, Dawning and Galactic Computers, have said that they intend to develop petaflop computers. (Source: John Markoff, The New York Times, August 19, 2005).