IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer has topped the latest list of the fastest supercomputers for the fourth consecutive time.

The vendor claims six out of the top 10 systems, and accounts for 42 per cent of total computing power in the tally of 500 most powerful computers in the world announced in the TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list.

The 29th edition of the list, published twice annually, is compiled and published by supercomputing experts and is designed to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing, used for operations such as financial modelling, space research and forecasting the global climate.

The BlueGene/L system, installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, takes the number one spot for reaching a performance of 280.6 teraflops, or trillion operations per second.

Only two other systems exceeded the level of 100 teraflops - the upgraded Cray’s Jaguar system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with a performance of 101.7 teraflops, which took the number two spot, while third place was also taken by a Cray system - Sandia National Laboratory’s Red Storm system, at 101.4 teraflops.

Two new IBM BlueGene/L systems entered the Top 10, at the New York Center for Computational Science and at the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.

The fastest supercomputer in Europe is an IBM JS21 cluster at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre in Spain, which ranked number nine, at 62.63 teraflops. IBM systems account for 46 of the Top 100 and 39 of them are built on its Power architecture hardware running versions of Unix (AIX) and Linux software.