Earth Simulator loses the top spot

The Earth Simulator lost its top spot in this years Top500 supercomputer index, it slipped down two places to third place

The former fastest computer clocked up a staggering 35 Terraflops score, but thats nothing compared to what replaced it

Blue Gene is an IBM machine currently in testing, It is being assembled for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, for the US Department of Energy. in its current incarnation it has recorded calculations upto 70 Teraflops a second, or twice what The Earth Simulator reached, this is a staggering feat, and it will be even faster when it is complete

It's a long way from the worlds first super computer, the Cray-1, which was built almost 30 years ago, that reached a whopping 80 mega flops, Blue Gene is 5 million times faster!


read the full report at the BBC
and for you geeks