A mere 29 days ago IBM announced that it's Blue Gene/L system was the world's fastest computer capable of a sustained speed of 36.01 teraflops (a teraflop is a trillion calculations per second).

Yesterday, NASA announced that its Project Columbia Beowulf cluster achieved a sustained performance of 42.7 teraflops. The $50 million dollar system will be used "to speed up spacecraft design, environmental prediction and other research."

Remarkably, this system was built in only 120 days.

This rivalry isn't over yet. Neither Blue Gene nor Project Columbia is operating at its top theoretical speed. Only 16 of Project Columbia's 20 computer units were operational at the time it was tested.