Is China now the world's top supercomputer power?

The Tianhe-1A supercomputer in Tianjin, China: Power is nothing without control.
China is an emerging superpower, and now, also an emerging supercomputer power.
This week, the country's Tianhe-1A supercomputer was ranked number one on the most recent Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
Tianhe-1A (meaning Milky Way in Chinese) has knocked America's Jaguar system to second place. Coming in third, yet another ultra fast Chinese computing machine called Nebulae.
Located at the National Computing Center in Tianjin, the Tianhe-1A, runs at a top speed of 2.57 petaflops per second (one petaflop equals 1,000 trillion calculations per second). It reportedly will be used for oil exploration and aircraft design.
Just three years ago the top supercomputer was IBM Blue Gene and operated with just a half-petaflop; today it is ranked only 12th on the list.
The U.S. remains the foremost supercomputing power on the planet with 275 of the world's top 500 supercomputers on the list, which is published twice a year.
But with China's and Tianhe-1A ascent to first place, some are asking whether a supercomputer race could soon be underway.
In total, China has 42 ultra-fast computers on the Top 500 list, surpassing Japan, France, Germany and the UK to become the number two supercomputer producer behind America.
"People have to ask what this means in terms of global competitiveness," Charles Leiserson, a professor of computer science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told CNN.
"People in the U.S. should take note. I don't think this is something to panic about, but people should not be complacent."
Supercomputers mean a lot in terms of global competitiveness.
Read more:http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/11/18/supercomputer.china/index.html