IBM's Blue Gene/L Sets New Speed Record

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

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, which the National Nuclear Security Administration will use to simulate 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 that is being assembled for the Livermore lab is currently about half its eventual size of 131,072 processors. The full-size version of the machine is expected to be operational in June or July.