17/11/2009

The biannual top 500 supercomputer list from Top500.org has been released, showing the fastest machines the world.

Coming in at first place was the US-owned Cray Jaguar computer in Tennessee, which houses 220,000 microchips and has a speed of 1.759 petaflops. It is used for researching climate science and nuclear energy among other things.

One petaflop is equivalent to a speed of 1,000 trillion calculations a second. Only two machines in the world can run at such a fast speed.

The Jaguar has taken the top spot from another US-owned computer nicknamed 'the roadrunner', a New Mexico-based supercomputer which researches astronomy and genomics and also monitors the US's nuclear weapons hoard.

Outside the US, Germany's IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer and China's Tianhe-1 both made the top five and are the only non-US machines to make it into the top ten.

The UK has the largest number of supercomputers in Europe that made the poll, containing 44 out of the 500 listed around the world.