Getting back in the game

America has regained bragging rights to the world's most powerful supercomputer, after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus.

IBM Corp. is set to disclose today that its Blue Gene/L supercomputer, operating in a Rochester, Minn., lab, clocked a sustained performance of 36.01 teraflops per second on Sept. 16, surpassing the 35.61 teraflops attained by NEC Corp.'s Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan, in April 2002. Paul Horn, senior vice president at IBM Research, will discuss the milestone on a panel this morning at the second annual Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT.

Researchers at IBM plan to submit the results of their supercomputer tests to publishers of the Top 500 Supercomputer list, which is expected to next appear in November. Its measure, the teraflop, is equivalent to a trillion calculations per second.

When the Japanese computer first topped the list two years ago, some had likened its impact to that of Sputnik, the Soviet satellite that orbited the earth in 1957 and stirred widespread anxiety that the United States was losing its technological edge. American-built supercomputers led the ranking for most of the previous decades.

"It's heartening that the US is back in the game," said Benjamin Grosof, information technology professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. "It's definitely true that we'd fallen behind for a while. And strategically speaking, supercomputing is important."

Eric Kronstadt, director of exploratory server systems for IBM Research, said Blue Gene/L is much smaller than Earth Simulator and consumes far less power. A larger version of the machine, expected to have a peak performance of 360 teraflops per second, will be delivered to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California next year.

"We're aiming at a much bigger number," Kronstadt said.

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.