| A $100 million supercomputer being built to analyze the nation's nuclear stockpile has again set an unofficial performance record - the second in just over a month. IBM Corp.'s still-incomplete Blue Gene/L system, which will be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieved a sustained performance of 70.72 trillion calculations per second using a standard test program, the Department of Energy said Thursday. The world's current official leader, Japan's Earth Simulator, can sustain 35.86 trillion calculations per second using the same software. The announcement is the latest in a series of claims leading up to next Tuesday's unveiling in Pittsburgh of the official list of the world's top computers. |