After being ousted from the top notch just a few months ago, IBM has set a new world record for computing power with the improved Blue Gene/L. Also called Big Blue, it's been their token of computing power for many years, and now with 65,536 processors is capable of more than 280 Teraflops. That more than doubles the previous series power and puts all other competetion (feasible or not) in the dust, at least temporarily. Don't expect to see these at your corner PC store, because with a price tag of $290 Million for that and their “lower” 100 Teraflops speed model, ASC Purple, only a few will have access to such machines.

The article goes into the history of Blue Gene and talks a bit about supercomputing as well as some uses for the computational beasts. It's an interesting read for big PC nuts.