A new Chinese supercomputer -— Tianhe-1A -— has achieved 2.5 petaflops on the LINPACK benchmark. Not bad! Jaguar was at 1.75 petaflops in June’s Top500 list. More information here.
One interesting point, according to the article above, is that the machine has a Chinese-developed network that operates at twice the speed of Infiniband.
I recall when the Earth Simulator came out and perceived a sense of surprise and urgency from certain groups due to the top machine not being in the United States. In this case, it is less of a surprise, but it would be interesting to see how people respond.