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.

