IBM announced today that their latest Blue Gene/P supercomputer brings triple the performance of the system it is replacing. This massively powerful computer is intended to allow science and commercial supercomputing to do things like model entire organs for drug effects.

IBM says the Blue Gene/P solution scales to operate continually at speeds exceeding one petaflop, or one-quadrillion operations per second. That makes this supercomputer about 100,000 times more powerful than a home computer and processes more operations in one second than a stack of laptop computers over 1.5 miles high. The geek in me wonders if what I could score in 3DMark on this beast.
"Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has ever known," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing, IBM. "A new group of commercial users will be able to take advantage of its new, simplified programming environment and unrivaled energy efficiency. We see commercial interest in the Blue Gene supercomputer developing now in energy and finance, for example. This is on course with an adoption cycle -- from government labs to leading enterprises -- that we've seen before in the high-performance computing market." Via IBM