Some people may think the US is losing ground in science and technology, but for the time being at least, it’s still setting the pace in supercomputing. BlueGene/L, which was already number one on the latest Top 500, nearly doubled its performance after doubling its processor count. Back in mid-February, truckloads of components began arriving at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which operates the IBM built system for the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and the folks at LLNL added another 32,000 processors to the equal number already installed. Well, the early results are in. Roughly as expected, BlueGene/L can now crank away at 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), up from the 70.72 teraflops it was doing at the end of 2004. BlueGene/L now has half of its planned processors and is more than half way to achieving its design goal of 360 teraflops.

[CORRECTION] In the last sentence above, we mistakenly said that BlueGene/L “is more than half way to achieving its design goal of 360 teraflops.” Thanks for pointing out our error and thanks for the comments.