China,  Europe, and Japan are rushing to build supercomputing centers in competition with the United States, said David Turek, IBM’s vice president of deep computing.

China has 24 systems on the most recent Top500 list, and China has the world’s second-most-powerful supercomputer on the planet, the Nebulae, a 1.27-petaflop system, according to the most recent Top500 ranking. The top system is Cray’s 1.76-petaflop Jaguar supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“The No. 1 goal is to maintain U.S. leadership in high-performance computing,” said Rick Stevens, associate director for computing, environment and life sciences at the Argonne National Lab. That means having an exascale system by 2020. There are about 1,000 scientists involved in the U.S. Exascale Initiative.