U.S. officials are revealing plans Friday to spend $425 million on advanced supercomputer technology, the latest sign of the government's determination to leapfrog China in a field often linked to national security and economic competitiveness.

The Energy Department says it will install two International Business Machines Corp. systems valued at $325 million at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The project, called Coral, also includes Argonne National Laboratory. The machines, which also include technology from chip maker Nvidia Corp., will carry out calculations five to seven times faster than the most advanced U.S. systems now in use, the agency said.

The department will spend another $100 million to further develop "extreme scale" supercomputing technologies as part of a program titled FastForward 2. Argonne is expected to pick a supercomputer under the Coral program later, the agency said.

Supercomputers, room-sized systems that comprise thousands of microprocessor chips, perform tasks that include simulating nuclear explosions, cracking encryption codes, projecting climate trends and locating oil deposits. China's 2013 success in building a system that topped a closely watched ranking of computer performance--interrupting years of U.S. dominance--prompted calls by U.S. scientists for greater government support.

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who is announcing the projects Friday at an event in Washington, D.C., said in prepared remarks they will foster "transformational advancements in basic science, national defense, environmental and energy research."

Installation work on the two supercomputers is expected to begin in 2017. Beyond their sheer scale, the new machines will exploit new technologies in the race to solve tough scientific problems more quickly.

IBM, for example, will employ what it calls a data-centric design to reduce the need to shuttle massive amounts of data within the supercomputers. Nvidia, meanwhile, will contribute chips to handle number-crunching as well as a new technology called NVLink designed to transfer data between them at unusually high speed.

These new approaches are designed to reduce energy consumption and address other emerging challenges, executives of the two companies said.

Starting in the 1990s, computer makers started assembling supercomputers by stringing together the kinds of processor chips and other components used in personal computers. In recent years, that technology has been augmented by chips from Nvidia and others that evolved from technology used to render graphics in videogames.

But such machines consume huge amounts of electricity. Improving performance by simply stacking more of those components together wouldn't be practical, industry executives and computer scientists say.

Moreover, computer designers are grappling with an explosion in the amount of data that users want to sift through, said Dave Turek, an IBM vice president in charge of high-performance computing efforts. Much of the computation carried out in efforts to locate underground oil deposits, for example, is in preparing data for analysis rather than the analysis itself, he said.

Without an expansion in computing capacity, the data-handling challenge appears likely to come to a head in about three years, Mr. Turek said, based on conversations IBM had with supercomputer users.

"They were telling us, they saw a real problem around 2017," he said.

To solve it, IBM added computing power to components--including data storage and networking devices--that usually carry a light burden of calculation. That way, the supercomputer can delegate heavier computing tasks to those components and reduce the amount of data that must be transferred and processed by central processing units, Mr. Turek said.

The systems to be installed at Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge will use future versions of IBM Power chip line to handle basic computation chores. Other calculations are handled by a new version of Nvidia's graphic chips, code-named Volta, said Sumit Gupta, an Nvidia executive in charge of its accelerated computing efforts. Mellanox Technologies Ltd. will supply other communications technology.

The news from the Energy Department comes a few days before the release of a twice-yearly ranking of the 500 largest supercomputers, dubbed the Top500. It isn't clear whether the new systems will surpass China's Tianhe-2 machine, which first reached the top of the list in June 2013 and since has remained there.

Cray Inc. previously was selected to install supercomputers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory that are considered contenders for the top ranks of the Top500 list. The company uses Intel Corp. chips in some of its latest machines.

Horst Simon, deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley lab and head of its supercomputer efforts, said many U.S. scientists would have preferred that the Energy Department had launched its latest expenditures sooner.

"This investment is late, but it's still a significant investment," he said.

Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com

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