The world's Top500 supercomputer rankings list was unveiled on June 22, 2005 at the International Supercomputer Conference in Heidelberg, Germany. IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer holds the number one position on the chart again.

IBM seizes six positions in the top 10 and it also has the most systems in the competition at 259, or 51.8 percent. Hewlett Packard, the second placeholder (total number of systems), had 131 systems present.

In the previous top500 list released half a year ago, the Blue Gene/L supercomputer for the first time surpassed Japanese "Earth Simulator", which had been on top of the chart for nearly three years. This time the supercomputer based in Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California managed to win with a performance score of 136.8 teraflops per second. The second place winner is another Blue Gene system with total Linpack score of 91.2 teraflops per second.

American SGI's supercomputer "Columbia", designed for NASA ranks the third. NEC's "Earth Stimulator" is the fourth, with a score of 35.86 teraflops per second.

NEC announced it has begun to build a supercomputer capable to perform 1,000 trillion calculations per second by 2010.

The Top500 supercomputer list, which is released semi-annually, is jointly compiled by University of Mannheim, Germany; NER C/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville since 1993.

By People's Daily Online