IBM's Blue Gene/L: world's fastest supercomputer at 280.6 teraflops

Whoa Nelly! IBM's Blue Gene/L has again crushed its own supercomputer record now pumping out an amazing 280.6 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second). That's more than double the 136.9 teraflops they were flaunting back in June or the, um, pathetic 70.7 teraflops they were pushing just 12 months ago. That's a four-fold increase in processing power in just 12 months! While it appears IBM stands in staunch defiance of Moore's Law, keep in mind that Blue Gene/L actually uses a collection of five separate networks to connect 65,536 specialized IBM processors. In fact, the machine was only half-built when they hit the 136.9 mark back in June. Also, the Top500 Supercomputer list (being announced 15Nov) measures response to the Linpack mathematical test which Blue Gene/L runs on every processor whereas other applications (like nuclear weapons simulations maybe?) result in half the system's processors being tied up in networking tasks. Oh, ok, well we're still waiting for that computer in a teaspoon anyway.