IBM’s Blue Gene/L, being built for the National Nuclear Security Agency at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, attained 70.72 teraflops in recent testing, more than twice as fast as the current top machine on the Top500.org supercomputers list. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham made the announcement today, noting that in its final form, the Blue Gene/L will be about 9 times faster than the current #1 machine, the Japanese Earth Simulator.
From the release:

“High performance computing is the backbone of the nation’s science and technology enterprise,” [Abraham said,] “which is why the Department has made supercomputing a top priority investment. Breakthroughs in applied scientific research are possible with the tremendous processing capabilities provided by extremely scalable computer systems such as BlueGene/L.”

The New Scientist has more on the story here.
We noted Blue Gene/L’s first record-breaking performance figures back in September.
The next version of the official Top500 list, with Blue Gene/L expected at the top, will be released at next week’s Supercomputing 2004 conference.