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IBM has obliterated the competition in the supercomputing stakes with the top 10 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, but Microsoft has surprisingly scraped in at number 23 with its Windows HPC Server system. While Microsoft is an unlucky 13 numbers away from the top 10, does the wow start now? Microsoft can’t claim any particular ‘wow’ with its results until it can wrest a top 10 position, let alone the No.1 position away from IBM, but 23 isn’t too bad when we’re talking about a list of 500. But the real news isn’t about Microsoft, it’s about...

Supercomputers based on Apple’s Xserve technology landed four spots on the newest TOP500 list. The announcement came during the 20th International Supercomputer Conference, held this week in Heidelberg, Germany. Presented by the Universities of Mannheim and Tennessee and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NESRSC) Center, the TOP500 project collects performance benchmarks for the most powerful computing systems on the planet. The TOP500 list is created by comparing the best performance of the “Linpack” benchmark, which tests the system by making it solve a dense system of linear equations. The TOP500 list is generated twice each year. Four Apple-based supercomputers...

<p>The brand new "Big Mac" supercomputer at Virginia Tech could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the planet, according to preliminary numbers.</p> <p>Early benchmarks of Virginia Tech's brand new supercomputer -- which is strung together from 1,100 dual-processor Power Mac G5s -- may vault the machine into second place in the rankings of the worlds' fastest supercomputers, second only to Japan's monstrously big and expensive Earth Simulator.</p>