IBM's hybrid supercomputer, built for the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Los Alamos National Lab, burned its way into the TOP500 Supercomputer record book today as the most powerful system in the world. Its sustained performance of 1.02 petaflops (1.02 quadrillion calculations per second) puts the system in a class of its own -more than three times faster than the nearest non-IBM system.

The official results were reported today during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, where the bi-annual listing of the World?s TOP500 Supercomputer Sites was released. http://www.top500.org/

Built by IBM for the NNSA and housed at its Los Alamos National Laboratory, the system gets its power from 12,240 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell Broadband Engine processors -derived from chips that power today's most popular videogame consoles. 6,562 AMD Opteron Dual-Core processors perform basic compute functions, freeing the IBM PowerXCell 8i chips for the math-intensive calculations that are their specialty.

For more information about IBM supercomputing, visit http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/deepcomputing/