China’s announcement of the world’s fastest supercomputer is a “wake-up call. … We’re losing an advantage,” says Jack Dongarra, a professor at University of Tennessee’s department of electrical engineering and an author of the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites website.

“The Chinese designed their own interconnect. It’s not commodity. It’s based on chips, based on a router, based on a switch that they produce. … They’ve put something together that is roughly twice the bandwidth of an InfiniBand interconnect [which is used widely in the U.S.].

“You have to remember that you have to not only invest in the hardware. It’s like a race car. In order to run the race car, you need a driver. You need to effectively use the machine. And we need to invest in various levels within the supercomputer ecology. The ecology is made up of the hardware, the operating system, the compiler, the applications, the numerical libraries, and so on. And you have to maintain an investment across that whole software stack in order to effectively use the hardware. And that’s an aspect that sometimes we forget about. It’s underfunded. … We currently have a very crude way of doing programming.”