Today, I was quite amazed to read about supercomputers. This evening, I started reading my daily technology news from my Google Reader Feeds which compiles a list of groundbreaking articles from various websites like New Scientist, New York Times, BBC Technology News amongs others. As one thing leads to another, I drifted from reading about China’s Anti-Satellite (ASAT) test, global climate issues, Google’s brain drain, to NASA’s ambition to join the petaflop elite.

A few minutes later, I landed on wikipedia, reading about supercomputers and petaflops. So, did you know what is the most powerful supercomputer on Earth? Humbly, I didn’t know. Now, I do.

IBM’s BlueGene/L tops the list and I was quite impressed that a few of IBM’s machines feature among the Top10. A few years back, IBM and Microsoft news were at the corner of every streets. Then everyone started talking about Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Intel, nVidia etc. But now, I’m convinved IBM is still doing something great, though not much popular.

A few institutions are working towards the petaflop era, expecting the huge behemoth supercomputers to handle larger models and simulations. Further information can be found here.