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The BlueGene/L supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory placed first for the second consecutive year.

The world's leading authority on supercomputer ranking, TOP500, has announced that the IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer is the most powerful one in the world, for the second consecutive year.

IBM's newest supercomputer, Watson Blue Gene based in Yorktown, NY, came in second on the list, where IBM took six of the top ten spots. WBG ranks as the most powerful privately owned supercomputer today.

BlueGene/L was measured as having a top performance of 136.8 teraflops, which would be trillions of floating point calculations per second. Through the summer, IBM expects that performance to increase to 360 teraflops.

With 259 systems on the list, IBM becomes the first vendor to have more than 51 percent of the total number of ranked systems. "The latest list, particularly if you look at the Top 10, clearly illustrates the dynamic nature of supercomputing today," said Erich Strohmaier, one of the founding editors of the TOP500 list.

BlueGene/L performs work for the government on one of the most critical areas of research in the world. "We are doing science critical to (the) National Nuclear Security Administration's mission to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile.

"This represents a great team effort led by NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing program," said Dona Crawford, associate director for Computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Out of the 500 listed machines, 304 were Linux commodity clusters. Eight of the top ten supercomputers run Linux. Linux has grown from a dorm room creation to being a dominant presence on the world's most powerful computing hardware.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.