IBM’s Blue Gene/L supercomputer has achieved a new world record as it continued its four-year domination of the official TOP 500 Supercomputer Sites list. The Top 500 list was released at the Supercomputer Conference in Reno, Nevada later Monday.

IBM's Blue Gene/L was expanded this summer to deliver a sustained performance of 478 trillion calculations per second (478 "teraflops").

Before the upgrade Blue Gene/L system was capable to deliver delivers a sustained performance of 280.6 trillion operations per second or teraflops. But now it is nearly three times faster than the rest of the pack. 

In fact IBM systems dominate the TOP500 rankings with a total of 232 on the list, from which 183 are cluster configurations built with commodity microprocessors. IBM also outpaced its rivals among the Top 10, with four IBM systems -- all Blue Genes -- and 38 supercomputers among the Top 100. IBM's 232 systems account for 45 percent of the combined computational power of the list.

But it seems like the teraflops aren’t enough for IBM, as the company is closing in on a computing milestone known as a “petaflop”, the ability to process 1,000 trillion calculations every second.  Petaflop computers promise exponential breakthroughs in science and engineering by providing predictive and highly detailed simulations. Earthquake simulations, for example, could show building-by-building movements of entire regions along the San Andreas fault, improving future designs of earthquake-resistant structures. 

The fastest supercomputer in Europe, and the second-fastest in the world, has gone into operation in Germany hours before the announcement of the latest international supercomputer rankings.

Europe's entry, Blue Gene/P, is a scientific-research machine codenamed Jugene at a federal science complex at Juelich, near the Dutch border, which manages 167 trillion basic operations per second (teraflops).

The machine has a computing capacity equivalent to that of 20,000 personal computers. It has been installed in recent weeks and is not set to be officially inaugurated till February. Scientists can request time on the computer at Juelich to test mathematical models in chemistry, nuclear physics and medicine.

Last year, the summit of the Top 500 was occupied also by Livermore’s BlueGene/L but at that time, another Juelich computer, Blue Gene (JUBL), ranked eighth in the world.

Jugene occupies 16 cabinets about the size of telephone boxes.
The computer far outshines the planned supercomputer at the German weather service (DWD), which will manage just 39 teraflops, according to an announcement last month.