We had brilliant graduates coming out of places like the Cambridge computing laboratory, he said, but that supply could dry up, and we needed a wider hinterland of skilled people.

BBC: Why can't the UK produce world-beating tech companies?

"One challenge in supercomputers today is power consumption, " said Jeff Nichols, associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences.

ENGADGET: Cray's Jaguar supercomputer upgraded with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, renamed Titan

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) was established at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2004 with the mission of providing leadership computing for scientists working on some of the world's most pressing problems.

ENGADGET: Titan supercomputer to be loaded with 'world's fastest' storage system