By ASHLEE VANCE


More nations are
getting high-speed
systems as prices drop.


For years, Western governments have used supercomputers to model weapons of nuclear war.

Now a company in China uses the powerful machines to tend the fantasy realms of World of Warcraft.

Supercomputers, which are up to a million times faster than the typical desktop PC, are still staples in the data warehouses of national laboratories and universities in the United States, Japan and Western Europe. But over the last few years, the falling cost of supercomputer systems has allowed a broader range of corporations and institutions, including many in China and India, to buy them for everything from processing movie graphics to searching for oil.

Just 18 months ago, China and India lacked a single system among the 25 fastest in the world. But on the latest list of the 500 fastest computers, released November 17, China achieved the Number 10 spot, standing as the only nation besides the United States in the top 10. India, meanwhile, had the 13th-fastest machine, beating Japan, a longtime leader.

China now claims 15 of the world’s 500 fastest computers. That makes it the top-ranking supercomputing country outside the United States, Western Europe and Japan.

The presence of supercomputers in nations like China and India says as much about those countries’ growing national ambitions as the changing state of science and business.

“These other countries are following behind the U.S. and perhaps some other nations in Western Europe, but they are there,’’ said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee. “These countries are making a clear statement about their intentions.’’

The vast majority of supercomputers are built by I.B.M. and Hewlett- Packard. But China’s top system, located at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center, was assembled by the Chinese manufacturer Dawning. Like many of the fastest machines, the Shanghai system will handle research tasks, which remain the most important role for supercomputers. The ability of these machines to simulate experiments, explosions and the weather makes them crucial in an age when scientific discovery often takes place by manipulating large databases of information instead of running physical experiments.

“They are not buying these machines because they like to burn electricity and heat the air,’’ said Mark Seager, head of advanced computing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Still, the sharply falling cost of fast computers makes them attractive to businesses for uses that would have been impractical even a few years ago. For years, some of the fastest machines in China have belonged to The9, a video game developer that owns the local distribution rights to Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft franchise. Earlier this year, The9 boasted of hosting more than one million World of Warcraft players online at the same time.

The list of China’s fastest computers is also filled with systems owned by oil and gas companies, financial firms and media companies.
Of all the new entrants to the supercomputing race, China appears the most focused.

“If you look at China and what they are spending to get ahead, it’s clear this is a national priority,” said Douglas Comer, vice president of research at Cisco Systems.“They are definitely coming from behind, and they know that.They’re hungry.’’