SGI and NASA jointly announce that NASA's intanium 2 processor-based Columbia supercomputer is the world's fastest computer:
"IBM Inc. just refreshed NEC two weeks ago and maintained its supercomputer speed record for two years, but its record was refresh by SGI again.
SGI announced on Tuesday, local time that it was sold to the National Aviation and Space Administration (NASA) In February this "Columbia" supercomputer System Based on Linux, the price is USD 50 million. It can perform 42.7 trillion operations per second. However, this speed is not its highest speed, it only uses 10240 of the 4/5 intel anteng processors.
This speed is higher than the 36.1 tflop of IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer system. SGI does not consider itself to be able to maintain this record for a long time. Dave, senior vice president of the company's servers and platform group, said it is clear that several companies are sprinting, and IBM may refresh its supercomputer speed record again. "
Full text source: enet