Even in a field defined by continuous breakthroughs, the achievement was a shocker: last March the Japanese government fired up a computer that soon proved to be the fastest in the world, in some cases outperforming the next-fastest computer by a factor of 10. The Earth Simulator, built by NEC, took four years to assemble and cost at least $350 million. It quickly delivered real-world scientific results in global-climate modeling, completing simulations that made other computers look crude. Scientists worldwide lined up for the limited amount of computer time available to researchers outside Japan. By June, just weeks after the machine hummed to life, three of the six finalists for the prestigious Gordon Bell awards in high-performance computing had run their projects on the Earth Simulator.

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