In the supercomputer universe, bragging rights go to the machine packed with the most number-crunching speed. And a spirited competition has raged for several years now between the U.S. and Japan for leadership in high-performance computing. For the last two years, IBM's BlueGene/L at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory kept the U.S. in the lead over a meteorological modeling machine developed by NEC called the Earth Simulator. For those of you keeping score out there, Japan is about to take back the world speed record for computing it held earlier in the decade. The MDGrape-3 at Riken (formerly known as the Institute of Physical & Chemical Research) in Yokohama was clocked at a mind-boggling one quadrillion calculations per second. In industry-speak, that's one "petaflop" of floating-point calculations per second.
