It's a heady time in high-performance computing, driven by rapid improvements in the chips that supply number-crunching power. The next target could be data storage.

For the past 15 years or so, most of the action has been in packing hundreds or thousands of PC-style microprocessors into supercomputers called clusters. More recently, some researchers have been trying to boost performance further by adding graphics chips, which each have hundreds of specialized processors. A system from China, for example, this month took...