I.B.M. Supercomputer Sets World Record for Speed

Overtaking the Earth Simulator, a Japanese climate simulator built by NEC Corporation, International Business Machines' (I.B.M.) BlueGene/L has become the fastest supercomputer in the world by breaking the record made in 2002. Supercomputing technology was held in high esteem in the 80's and 90's, however in the US fell by the way side in recent times, much to the concern of US companies that need to stay fast to stay competitive such as biotechnology and medical science. The Linpack benchmark, a test program that solves a dense system of mathematical equations, showed that BlueGene/L could hold a sustained performance of 36.01 trillion calculations per second, or teraflops, compared to the Earth Simulator's 35.86. The machine which broke the speed record, housed in I.B.M.'s production center in Rochester, MN, is only the prototype with 16,000 processors. The full-sized machine has 130,000 processors and is scheduled to be installed in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA sometime in 2005. It has been speculated that speeds provided by the BlueGene/L system will have a significant impact on science in the coming years.