Johannesburg, 29 Jun 2006
The BlueGene/L System supercomputer - a joint development by IBM and the US National Nuclear Security Administration - has been confirmed as the most powerful computer ever, in the 27th edition of the Top500 list of the world`s fastest supercomputers.
Able to process speeds of over 280-tetraflops, or 280 trillion calculations per second, the supercomputer resides in the US Department of Energy`s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
BlueGene has now won the award three years in a row, since its September 2004 claim that it had overtaken NEC`s Earth Simulator as the world`s fastest computer, with speeds of 36-tetraflops.
Since then, it has rapidly increased in processing power, and is now almost 200-tetraflops ahead of its nearest rival, another IBM machine.
Bevan Lock, IBM SA systems evangelist, says 243 of the top 500 are IBM ventures or IBM joint-ventures.
"IBM had more than 1.5-petaflops of the list`s aggregate performance total of 2.791-petaflops, more than three times the total throughput of nearest rival HP," he says.
This latest edition of the Top500 was released yesterday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.
Share