Dive Brief:

• Computers are a million times faster than they were in 1993, according to the Top500, a list that ranks high-performance computers on raw speed (the list contains only machines whose results have been submitted for inclusion).

• China leads the list in terms of the country with the greatest number of supercomputers with 167, Computerworld notes. The U.S. has 165. In 2001, China did not even make the list.

• Big Data and large-scale data challenges mean companies are asking for more power and chip manufacturers are working hard to respond, pushing the limits of what supercomputers can do.

Dive Insight:

Supercomputers can provide a market advantage of many corporations, which is helping drive demand.

"Before they put crash dummies in real cars they have run thousands of crash simulations on a computer model," Sumit Gupta, IBM's vice president of HPC and data analytics, told Computerworld. "Cell phone makers run simulations to find the best place to put antenna, and simulate the thermals of the phone so it doesn't get too hot."

The White House is even getting in on the competition. Last year, it launched the National Strategic Computing Initiative, a collaborative effort between government, industry and academia to promote the creation of exaflop, or exascale, systems.

The exascale target will be hit when a computer can perform a billion billion (that's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. China is believed to be the nation closest to hitting the target, and it currently has the world's two fastest supercomputers.