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.

A smattering of articles last spring covered the news, quoting experts who compared the Earth Simulator to Sputnik-another instance of the United States' having been severely outclassed in a critical technology. But outside the rarefied circles of high-end computing, the story soon died. U.S. computer vendors have been downplaying the achievement, dismissing the Earth Simulator as "old technology" or "too specialized" to be of much use, even insisting that it was a "publicity stunt." "Give us $400 million to spend on a single computer, and we could build something just as fast," says Peter Ungaro, vice president of high-performance computing at IBM.

"I love that," scoffs Gordon Bell, designer of the first minicomputer for Digital Equipment and a luminary in high-performance computing. "How is IBM going to do it? Where is the technology? I want to bet $1,000 that in the next year, IBM can't match the cost performance of the Earth Simulator on any system they have." In fact, IBM recently won a Department of Energy contract to build a pair of machines designed to run at two to nine times the speed of the Earth Simulator, but the project will take until 2005 to complete. Like many of those involved in high-powered scientific computing, Bell believes that Japan's achievement has exposed a gaping hole in the development of supercomputer systems in the United States-a hole that money alone can't fill.

What happened that allowed NEC to take such a tremendous lead in computing power? Simply put, the Japanese government saw fit to subsidize the development of the world's most expensive computer. The project's goal was not to grab bragging rights from the United States, but to advance scientists' understanding of the global climate by creating a machine that performs better modeling and weather simulations than ever before.