IBM smashes supercomputing record
A complex supercomputer being constructed for the US government has demonstrated double the power of the long-reigning supercomputing champion, despite being only partially built.
IBM's BlueGene/L achieved a record-breaking performance of 70.72 teraflops, announced Spencer Abraham, US energy secretary, on Thursday.
A single teraflop is one million million floating-point operations - or intensive mathematical calculations - per second, and is about 100 times faster than the most powerful desktop computers.
The new speed by BlueGene/L is precisely twice as fast as the computer officially ranked the world's fastest - NEC's Earth Simulator, based at Yokohama, Japan.
BlueGene/L has been developed in cooperation with the US department of energy's National Nuclear Security Administration and is being constructed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California.
