IBM’s Blue Gene computer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA has retained its title as the world’s fastest computer. And, it must be said, by a rather wide margin. It wasn’t even close.

The computer tested out at 478.2 teraflops. A teraflop equals 1 trillion calculations per second. The second place computer, also an IBM creation, clocked in at 167.3 teraflops.

How fast is that? As Professor Rick Luttmann puts it, a 1 teraflop computer can do 1000 calculations in the time it takes for light to travel one foot, which means Blue Gene can do 478,200 calculations in that amount of time. Yeah.

But what is the point of all this speed? Blue Gene was designed to simulate the effects of a hydrogen bomb explosion, whether it be fallout patterns or fuel issues. The computer’s job is to make sure the bombs are stable and reliable.

Blue Gene is made up of 104 refrigerated cabinets that hold 106,496 processors. Each processor is assigned a small part of a much larger math problem and they all work together to solve these bomb-related problems.

The third fastest computer was a Silicon Graphics machine in New Mexico, while Hewlett-Packard took fourth and fifth.

The world’s supercomputer market isn’t just involving top secret government studies. 57% of the computers are used by various industrial interests, and do things like simulate products to make for more efficient manufacturing, data mining, and financial modeling. The computers are also used to produce 3-D images of subterranean oil and gas locations.

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