[via MIT Technology Review]

IBM Corp.’s still-incomplete Blue Gene/L system, which will be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieved a sustained performance of 70.72 trillion calculations per second using a standard test program, the Department of Energy said Thursday.

The world’s current official leader, Japan’s Earth Simulator, can sustain 35.86 trillion calculations per second using the same software.

Last week, NASA announced that a system built by Silicon Graphics Inc. had topped that by sustaining 42 trillion calculations per second.

Blue Gene […] is just a quarter of its final planned size. When finished, it will exceed Earth Simulator’s performance by a factor of nine but require just a fraction of the electricity used by the Japanese machine.