It has only been eight years since the supercomputer crossed the 4 teraflops (4 trillion calculations per second) mark. But the leader then remains the leader now and Big Blue is not looking back. Many systems on the newest The Top500 ranking--released Wednesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany--weren't on the list at all when the last one was released in November 2006. But one familiar supercomputer, IBM's BlueGene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, again topped the Top500 List of Supercomputers with 131,072 processors, staying far ahead of its closest competitors by achieving speeds of 280.6 teraflops. IBM dominated the list with 6 of the top 10 systems and 192 of the total 500, though Hewlett-Packard is actually the overall leader in terms of the percentage of systems. Forty percent, or 203 of 500, are powered by HP, but IBM's total teraflop sum is 2,060, almost double HP's total of 1,202. 

For more on the list:
- see the Cnet article