Although IBM's Blue Gene/L system remains incomplete, it was recently named the fastest supercomputer in the world by the Top500 project, clocking in at an amazing 70.72 trillion calculations a second. The Blue Gene/L system unseated Japan's Earth Simulator as the supercomputing leader of the Top500 project rankings, compiled by an independent group of university scientists every six months, by virtually doubling the number of calculations it generated (70.72 trillion) per second over the runner-up.

IBM officials were happy with the honor, but even more thrilled their new supercomputer consumes about $1 million annually in electricity, a bargain compared to Japan's Earth Simulator that experts say would cost some $60 million a year to generate the same amount of calculations per second.

The IBM system is about as big as a medium-size home (2,500 square feet) compared to the Earth Simulator clocking in at 34,000 square feet.

Another domestic supercomputer, based at NASA's Ames Research Center, snagged the second spot on the Top500 project list with 51.87 trillion calculations per second.

Costing a combined $150 million, the Blue Gene/L system and the NASA supercomputer were also far less costly than the Earth Simulator's $250 million price tag and use processors very similar to ones that are commercially available.

USA Today November 8, 2004