And thus does the wheel keep turning. Remember how thrilled you were when you heard that NEC's Earth Simulator was finally going to be knocked out of the top spot on the list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers-- by a PowerPC-based system? Yep, IBM's BlueGene/L spat out a blinding 36.01 teraflops, just edging out the Earth Simulator's long-standing top score of 35.86. Of course, it was a short-lived sense of victory, since just three weeks later NEC struck back, announcing a sequel to the Earth Simulator called SX-8. SX-8 reportedly has a peak performance of 65 teraflops, although that's a theoretical maximum and not a real-world result. Still, assuming that SX-8 is roughly as efficient as the Earth Simulator, an estimated benchmark score for SX-8 would be somewhere around 57 teraflops, which, for those of you who haven't taken differential equations and multivariable calculus, is what the math geeks refer to as "way more than 36.01."

But keep those neck muscles loose, ladies and gentlemen, because this tennis match ain't over yet; faithful viewer jettfuel tipped us off to a NewScientist.com article which reports that IBM has just smacked the ball back into NEC's court so hard it burst into flame. You may recall that, when it broke the Earth Simulator's performance record, BlueGene/L hadn't yet been completed; it's not scheduled to be fully built and online until sometime next year. But there's clearly more of it in place than there once was, because the U.S. energy secretary just announced that the still-not-all-there BlueGene/L has now achieved an actual, recorded performance score of 70.72 teraflops. Don't look at that number too closely without a welder's mask.

By the way, there was also an intermediate scrapper vying for the throne; NASA had an Intel-based cluster named "Project Columbia" that has now reached 51.87 teraflops, but since that score was both lower than SX-8's likely numbers and way higher than BlueGene/L's PowerPCs had managed to crank out, we ignored it as irrelevant to the race for Numero Uno-- and really, really depressing for PowerPC fans. Of course, now that BlueGene/L has come back to smack those Itaniums (Itania?) upside-down, inside-out, and halfway into next March, the point is moot. And not nearly so upsetting, especially since when BlueGene/L is finally complete, IBM expects it to chew up a truly sick 360 teraflops, thus ushering in the age of petaflop-level scores and prompting all lesser supercomputers to commit ritual suicide in the face of their shame.

There is a dark cloud hiding somewhere under all this silver lining, though; while the PowerPC is way out in first place, the Mac is no longer even in the top five. The official TOP500 list won't be published until Monday, but if we're reading the latest Dongarra Report correctly, even with weeding out the multiple entries for the same clusters running with more or fewer processors, Virginia Tech's Xserve-based "System X" will fall to seventh place-- eighth, if the SX-8 manages to record a real score in time. But hey, a top ten score for a system that was originally thrown together by student volunteers in a matter of months using off-the-shelf Macs for under $6 million? There's still lots to be proud of, there. And the fact that's it's a cousin to Big Daddy BlueGene/L, well, it's nice to have family in high places.