Having built about 200 of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers to date, IBM is putting a great deal of effort into developing technology to raise the performance bar even higher. Besides, the competition isn't exactly waiting around: China, India and the American company SGI have already announced plans to build supercomputers of their own with a performance approaching one exaflop – one billion billion floating point operations per second, a fifty-fold improvement over today's fastest supercomputer – by as early as 2017.