IBM creates world's most powerful computer

The full Blue Gene/L machine was designed and built in collaboration with the Department of Energy's NNSA/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and has a peak speed of 360 Teraflops. Blue Gene systems occupy the #1 (Blue Gene/L) and #4 (Blue Gene Watson) positions in the TOP500 supercomputer list announced in June 2007.

The first supercomputer capable of crunching through a thousand trillion mathematical operations every second has been announced by IBM. This is roughly equivalent to the combined processing power of a 2.4-kilometre-high pile of laptop computers.

Blue Gene/P will be capable of a peak performance of 3000 trillion calculations, or floating point operations, per second (3 petaflops). But its sustained performance is expected to level out at around 1 petaflop.

Each processing chip inside the machines contains 4 unique processor cores. There are 32 of these processors in every circuit board, and 32 circuit boards in every rack. With a total of 216 racks, the full machine features 884,736 unique processor cores.

The first Blue Gene/P machine will be installed at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, US, later in 2007.