The Roadrunner supercomputer broke through one of the absolute world records for computer processing power when it performed one Petaflop or 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Not a trifling achievement considering that just a decade ago reaching the billion mark was a record.

What do the BlueGene/L System, the BlueGene/P system and the New Mexico Computing Applications Center SGI system, based on the Altix ICE Integrated Compute Environment 8200 model, have in common? First, they're the top three fastest computers in the world, according to the latest Top 500 supercomputer list. Second, they all run Linux.

In April, the Lonestar supercomputer, a Dell Linux Cluster with 5,840 processors at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, performed laser surgery on a dog in Houston without the intervention of a surgeon.

New work on the Sandia National Laboratories Red Storm supercomputer — the 17th fastest in the world — is helping to make supercomputers more accessible.

Jemmille recently visited the "Big Red" supercomputer at Indiana University. It is capable of a theoretical 20.4 trillion operations per second and has 4 terabytes of memory. It is powered by SUSE Linux. If sources are correct, that power has now been doubled. One awesome computer. (pic)

For decades, supercomputers have helped scientists perform calculations that would not have been possible on regular computers of that time. This post pays tribute to some of the most powerful supercomputers the world has seen, all the way from the 1970s until today.

NASA's new SGI Altix system is expected to be installed in August at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. The new system will be the first supercomputer to operate 2,048 processor cores and 4TB of memory under a single copy of Linux(R) -- creating the largest Linux single system image (SSI) in the world.

Supercomputers around the world are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. According to TOP500, a project that tracks and detects trends in high-performance computing, SUSE Linux Enterprise is the Linux of choice on the world's largest HPC supercomputers today.

Supercomputer manufacturer Cray has launched the Cray XT5 family of supercomputers, which it says is "the world's most scalable Linux-based supercomputer".