World's Fastest Supercomputer

Couple of weeks back I had been to Lawrence Livermore National Lab for a project meeting. That's when I saw the location which houses the world's fastest supercomputer, the Blue Gene. With a theoretical peak performance of 367 Teraflops, it is 3 times as powerful as it's closest competetor. So how does this compare to the system most of us are working on. You can think of it as 131072 high performance computers connected in parallel as a single system. Now that's some bunch of raw processing power !

Some interesting facts:

* The San Diego Supercomputer Centre at UCSD ranks at No. 35 on the Top 500 Supercomputers list with 15.6 Teraflops and 2464 processors.

* The Param Padma supercomputer developed by C-DAC in Pune has a maximum performance of about 1 Teraflops. At present there are about 6 supercomputers in India close to this supercomputing power.