The world's fastest commercial supercomputer named Blue Gene/P has been launched by computer giant IBM. Blue Gene/P is considered three times more potent than the current fastest machine, BlueGene/L, of IBM.

The latest number cruncher is capable of operating at so called "petaflop" speeds - the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second. The first machine has been bought by the US government since it is approximately 100,000 times more powerful than a PC. The machine will be installed at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois (USA) in 2007. Two further machines are planned for US laboratories and a fourth has been bought by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council for its Daresbury Laboratory Cheshire.

Blue Gene/L has been housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, USA. Since Blue Gene/ L has achieved 280.6 teraflops or trillions of calculations per second, it is used to ensure that the US nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable. Blue Gene/P comes with 294,912-processors connected by a high-speed, optical network. However, it can be expanded to pack 884,736 processors to compute 3,000 trillion calculations per second (three petaflops). The top five supercomputers are: (a) Blue Gene/L, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California. (280.6 teraflops; 131,072 processors); (b) Jaguar, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee (101.7 teraflops; (c ) 11,706 processors); Red Storm, Sandia National Laboratories, USA (101.4 teraflops; 26,544 processors); (d) BGW Blue Gene, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York (91.29 teraflops; 40,960 processors); (e) New York Blue, Stony Brook/BNL, New York Center for Computational Sciences, New York (82.161 teraflops; 36,864 processors)

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