IBM Supercomputer Sets Another Speed RecordIBM Supercomputer Sets Another Speed Record

An IBM supercomputer clocked as the world's fastest has surpassed its own speed record, the Energy Department reported Thursday.

IBM's Blue Gene/L, being assembled for the department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, performed 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second running benchmark software, the National Nuclear Security Administration said. The result eclipses the 70.72 teraflops that a smaller version of the system achieved running the Linpack benchmark program last fall. Blue Gene, being assembled for the NNSA for simulating the performance and safety of nuclear weapons and other applications, became the world's fastest supercomputer last September, surpassing a Japanese government-funded system.

The version of Blue Gene being assembled for the Livermore lab is about half its eventual size of 131,072 processors. IBM's design allows for extremely fast computational performance in a machine that takes up less space than traditional supercomputers, and consumes less power. The full-sized version of Blue Gene at Livermore is expected to be operational in June or July.

IBM's supercomputer got its name from its application for running computer simulations of biological processes. IBM has supplied other organizations, including a Japanese biology lab and the European particle physics lab CERN, with access to the technology.