"It's becoming an issue of national pride," said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is a vice president at Chiaro Networks, a technology provider for high-performance computing.

Computers will soon become "smarter than us," the supercomputer designer Danny Hillis asserted in a Newsweek essay.

Burton Smith, a longtime supercomputer designer and chief scientist at Cray, has resigned to take a position at Microsoft.

"The Japanese clearly have a level of will that we haven't achieved," said Thomas Sterling, a supercomputer designer at the California Institute of Technology.

"It's like adding a turbo to a car engine," said Steven J. Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is a consultant at Los Alamos.

To do so, some supercomputer designers are stepping back a bit from the commodity concept, looking to a decades-old kind of chip more often used in prototyping and manufacturing.

Mr. Cray, who founded the company, is considered the world's leading supercomputer designer.

Steve S. Chen, the supercomputer designer who left Cray Research in September after his project was canceled, announced the formation of his new company today.

Supercomputer Rivalry Seymour Cray, the nation's foremost supercomputer designer, will form his own company.

"Burton is the last independent supercomputer designer."