An IBM supercomputer already rated as the fastest in the world has overtaken its own speed record according to the US Energy Department. The record was achieved despite the fact that the computer in question is still only half built.

An IBM Blue Gene/L currently under construction at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California performed 135.3 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second) running benchmark software. The result overtakes the 70.72 teraflops achieved by a smaller version of the computer last September. This in itself was a record, overtaking a figure achieved by a computer used by the Japanese government.

The record was achieved despite the fact that the computer in question is still only half built.

With its 64 full racks, each holding 1,024 processors, it is expected to reach a peak theoretical performance of 360 teraflops this year.

Within two years, says Professor Pulleyblank, petaflop speeds will be reached - a thousand trillion calculations a second. But Moore's Law has not just successfully driven the chip industry's power advances for the last 40 years.