IBM continues to dominate the global high-performance computing market, with more machines than any vendor ranked among the world's elite supercomputers and its BlueGene/L System claiming the undisputed No1 position.
Researchers expected that IBM system to remain unchallenged over the next few editions of the Top500 list of the world's fastest computers, following Wednesday's release of the latest rankings at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.
The BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, has been No1 in the Top500 list since November 2004.
It has reached a Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 teraflops - or trillions of calculations per second - and remains the only system to exceed the level of 100 teraflops. Global rankings are based on the Linpack benchmark, which measures processor speed and scalability.
The TOP500 list has been compiled twice a year since 1993 by researchers Hans Meuer of Germany's University of Mannheim, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Centre at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
While some of the most ambitious supercomputing work still takes place in government and university laboratories, breakthroughs in new commercial markets - such as product design, simulation and animation, financial and weather modelling - is growing. Worldwide, many national and university labs use supercomputers in the areas of life sciences, hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics and space research.