Supercomputing leadership requires both speed and efficiency

The world's most powerful supercomputer was the first to operate at speeds faster than one quadrillion calculations per second. It also happens to be almost three times more energy efficient than the world's second fastest computer. It was made by IBM for the Department of Energy, and its operations will help certify the reliability of U.S. nuclear stockpiles without conducting underground nuclear tests.

Since its debut in 1993, the TOP500 Supercomputer List has ranked the most powerful systems in the world, but IBM was nowhere to be found on that first list that year. Yet, by November 1995, IBM had produced three of the top ten supercomputers on the list, more than any other company. Today, thanks to both its historic leadership in business computing and its unmatched commitment to research, IBM has manufactured 37% of the supercomputers on the entire list. More important, out of all the computing power represented by the list (also known as "total installed floating point throughput"), IBM's systems represent more than 39% of that power—more than any other of the nearly 30 manufacturers today on the list, and more than Hewlett-Packard and Cray (numbers 2 and 3, respectively, in terms of total computing power) combined.