Twice a year, the Top500 supercomputers list is put together, ordering, according to performance, the most powerful computers worldwide, that are available commercially.

On Wednesday, at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, the leader of 2008’s first list was announced to be IBM's RoadRunner.

The machine can make up to one thousand trillion calculations (one petaflop) per second and it is to be used for running virtual tests of U.S. nuclear tests.                      

Up to this point, the number one supercomputer in the world has been IBM's Blue Gene system, found at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab; the newcomer is twice as fast.

Although the RoadRunner took about one hundred million dollars out of IBM’s resources to built, the result of the company’s work seems to be more than satisfactory.

As the supercomputer’s name comes from New Mexico's state bird, the machine’s home is set to be the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. For the transportation of the computer, 21 tractor trailer trucks will be needed; the moving will take place later on this summer.

According to IBM, the power of supercomputers has increased about 1,000 times in the last decade. Three of the 3,456 tri-blade units found in the company’s machine have about the same power as the fastest computer back in 1998.

The RoadRunner packs 80 terabytes of memory and as far as physical dimensions go, with its 288 refrigerator-sized units, it occupies about 6,000 square feet.

Following the conference’s results, IBM can be very proud: out of the total of 500 systems, the company makes 210, out of which 5 are included in the top ten. HP came in second this year, with 183 systems.