The oldest supercomputer on the list just fell out of the top 100 for the first time.
When it debuted in July 2005, IBM's Blue Gene Watson was the second-fastest supercomputer in the world. It now ranks 138th-- still a remarkable achievement for a six-year old machine. The supercomputer is capable of 91.3 teraflops, or 91.3 trillion calculations per second.
Headquartered at the company's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, N.Y., Blue Gene Watson is primarily used to study physics, semiconductors and systems technologies that can be used to develop new IBM hardware, software and services. About 10% of the computer is devoted to external projects for other scientific researchers.
IBM, by far the largest supercomputer maker in the world, planned to run Watson -- its Jeopardy! playing computer -- on a Blue Gene supercomputer. Instead, IBM opted to run it on a commercially available Power 7 server, in order to demonstrate that businesses could one day buy a "Watson" for themselves.
Jaguar, the Department of Energy's supercomputer, is bigger, faster, and much louder that you'd expect.
