What a comeback! Last May we reported that the United States was poised to regain the title of "World's Fastest Supercomputer."

It's happened. On Tuesday IBM announced that it's Blue Gene/L system beat the Earth Simulator's maximum sustained speed of 35.86 teraflops with a sustained speed of 36.01 teraflops.

That's a speed differential of less than one-half of one percent. But how IBM did this is more impressive:

BlueGene/ L is one-hundredth the physical size of the Earth Simulator and consumes one twenty-eighth the power per computation, IBM said...

"It's again an exciting time to be involved in high-performance computing," said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who ranks the 500 fastest computers. "For some computational scientists, it's like a Hubble telescope."