SUPER SLOW.

Even with the proposed $1.9 billion pumped into the High Performance Computing and Communications initiative, the U.S. will still have a hard time catching up to Japan where supercomputing is already used extensively in manufacturing and design. A report from the Gartner Group points out that Cray Research Inc., the principal U.S. supercomputer vendor, has annual revenues of less than $1 billion. In contrast, the three largest Japanese computer companies which are Fujitsui, Hitachi, and NEC have annual revenues ranging from $17 billion to $48 billion.