IBM’s POWER processor-driven Blue Gene/L supercomputer has set a new world record by topping the official TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list for the fourth year running.

IBM Rochester was involved in the development of the world’s fastest computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California which is now nearly three times speedier than the rest of the pack. Livermore’s Blue Gene/L was expanded this summer to deliver a sustained performance of 478 trillion calculations per second (478 teraflops).

Second place in the list goes to a new installation of Blue Gene/P, a sister machine to Blue Gene/L, located at the research consortium Jülich in Germany and clocking in at 167 teraflops.

IBM systems dominate the TOP500 rankings with a total of 232 on the list, the most of any vendor. But not all its big beasts are driven by the POWER processors used by the System i and System p. The majority of IBM’s speediest systems -- 183 -- are cluster configurations built with PC-type processors, which the corporation yesterday cited as another TOP500 record. IBM’s 232 systems account for 45 per cent of the combined computational power of the list.

Big Blue says that it is closing in on petaflop barrier of being able to an incredible 1,000 trillion calculations every second. It is involved in several projects that will herald the start of the “petascale” era. Blue Gene/P, introduced this June and purpose built to operate at a petaflop and beyond, will be targeted initially at scientific and research markets, but its expanded memory and SMP nodes makes it attractive for a broader range of applications.

Also next year, new supercomputers based on POWER6 processor will begin to hit the market for commercial and technical tasks such as weather forecasting, climate modelling, energy exploration, and auto and aerospace engineering.

Seamus Quinn