The US may have more of the Top 500 supercomputers than any other nation, but its prestige in this area is slipping to nations like China and Japan. China's Tianhe-2 has been the world's fastest machine for two and a half years in a row, and the list's authors feel that the US approaching is plunging to a "historical low." With the weight of the federal government behind it, the NSCI is hoping to steal a march on its rivals and break new ground in the high performance computing sphere. With all of the various challenges that the planet is facing -- challenges that we're told Exascale computing will be able to fix -- it can't come soon enough.