Top500.org has officially benchmarked the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer system at 2.67 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), surpassing the former top achiever, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Cray XT5 Jaguar system, which clocked in at 1.75 petaflops.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory plans to unveil the IBM Sequoia system in 2012, which will exceed 20 petaflops. Also that year, the DOE’s Argonne National Lab should have its next-generation IBM Blue Gene supercomputer running, which will offer 10 petaflops.