Now the best bit of kit that the Americans have – the US Department of Energy's Cray XK7, has been beaten by a machine from Switzerland, pushing the US to number four.

Switzerland's Piz Daint system, which is installed at the country's national supercomputer centre boosted its performance from 9.8 petaflops to 19.6 which meant it surpassed the 17.6 petaflop capacity of the DoE machine, found at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

We guess it means it can hide Nazi gold a lot faster but it is dwarged by the 93 petaflops available to the Sunway TaihuLight machine at the nation's supercomputing centre in Wuxi.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory looks set to return to the top three later this year, when its Summit supercomputer comes online. This is expected to have a peak performance of more than 100 petaflops. However the Chinese are expected to upgrade too.