Blue Gene/L to top its own supercomputer record

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM unveiled the Blue Gene/L supercomputer on Thursday and announced it's broken its own record again for the world's fastest supercomputer. The 65,536-processor machine can sustain 280.6 trillion calculations per second, called 280.6 teraflops, IBM said on Thursday. That's more than twice the previous Blue Gene/L record of 136.8 teraflops, set when only half the machine was installed, and the top end of the range IBM forecast.

In addition, the lab unveiled a lesser known but also powerful machine, called ASC Purple, built from more conventional server products from IBM and with a speed up to 100 teraflops. Together, ASC Purple and Blue Gene/L cost US$290 million and will be used for nuclear weapons simulations and other computationally demanding tasks.