The race for supercomputers is heating up with India joining the bandwagon. Dominated by IBM for years, the race is on for a supercomputer that can attain the rate of a petaflop per second (over a thousand trillion calculations per second).

IBM heads the list with BlueGene/L, a supercomputer capable of 478 teraflops (478 trillion calculations per second) and this computer ensures that the US nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable. Next on the list is BlueGene/P capable of 167.3 teraflops. Third on the list is EKA, a Hewlett-Packard designed supercomputer based at the Computational Research Laboratories in Pune, Maharashtra, India that operates at 117.9 teraflops. A supercomputer based in New Mexico and one in Sweden round off the top five.

The supercomputers are capable of allowing highly detailed simulations and are highly useful in simulating earthquakes and tsunamis. Other scopes incude drug design and delivery, modellings of the economy among a host of other applications planned for them.