IBM claims supercomputing crown

Livermore (CA) - IBM said that its Blue Gene/L supercomputer trumps the performance of SGI’s recently announced Columbia system installed at NASA by more than 65 percent. It nearly doubles the speed of the Earth Simulator, which currently tops the list of the 500 fastest supercomputers.

The Blue Gene/L system currently is installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. During installation, the not yet completed supercomputer has achieved a sustained performance of 70.72 TFlops, surpassing the record of NASA’s Columbia system built by SGI of 42.7 TFlops just a week ago.

The officially fastest supercomputer at this time is NEC’s Earth Simulator with sustained performance of 35.86 TFlops, according to the current Top-500 list. When completed, Blue Gene/L will achieve approximately 280 TFlops.

The cost of the new supercomputer will be about $100 million.