The IBM supercomputer which has already been rated as the fastest machine in the world has broken its own record.

IBM's Blue Gene/L, being assembled for the department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, performed 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second running benchmark software, the National Nuclear Security Administration said. The result eclipses the 70.72 teraflops that a smaller version of the system achieved running the Linpack benchmark program last fall.

IBM's machine had already achieved some very impressive speed results, having performed 16-million-atom molecular dynamics simulations, and should eventually consist of a staggering 131,072 processors. The Supercomputer, which is under construction for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to simulate nuclear processes including the performance and safety of nuclear weapons, has a key role in ensuring the safety and reliability of the US nation's aging nuclear weapon stockpile.