IBM Supercomputer: Faster

The most powerful computer on the planet has broken its own record — now able to do more than twice the number of calculations per second. IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer can now do 280.6 teraflops — 280.6 trillion calculations a second. This makes it twice as fast as when it was ranked the most powerful computer on earth in June — every six months the fastest supercomputers are ranked by experts.

The machine, housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has quadrupled its performance in 12 months. At its current speed, Blue Gene can do more calculations per second than every person in the world armed with a handheld calculator would be able to do in decades. Previously under development, Blue Gene/L now joins another supercomputer ASC Purple working on protecting the USA's nuclear stockpile.

Purple on its own is capable of 100 Teraflops, or 100 trillion floating point calculations per second. When combined, the two machines are capable of nearly 400 Teraflops, that is nearly half a petaflop. IBM tries to put this number in context by pointing out that "if every person in the world had a hand-held calculator it would still take decades to perform the number of calculations Blue Gene performs every single second".

Blue Gene will work on materials ageing calculations, molecular dynamics, material modelling as well as turbulence and instability in hydrodynamics. Purple will then use that information to run 3D weapons codes needed to simulate nuclear weapons performance quickly. The rest of the time, the enormous processing power will be brought to bear on modelling the human brain, and other computationally intensive scientific research.