A view of the IBM Roadrunner supercomputer in an undated photo. (Reuters Photo) Photo Gallery>>>

     BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhuanet) -- IBM's "Roadrunner" supercomputer on Wednesday earned the title of the world's most powerful supercomputer.

    The ranking was bestowed during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, in a biannual event that ranks the 500 most powerful computers around the world.

    The Roadrunner, located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, achieved a peak performance of 1.026 petaFLOPS, overpassing IBM's BlueGene L and P systems to take the top spot.

    Roadrunner outperformed other supercomputers using a hybrid processor design that combines its Cell Broadband Engine with AMD's Opteron dual-core processors.

    Six months ago, Blue Gene/L reigned supreme among the world's fastest computers with a record 478.2 teraFLOPS. Trillions of calculations each second was only good enough for second place this time around.

    Rounding out the top five was Sun's "Ranger" cluster at the University of Texas, followed by the Cray "Jaguar" system in Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee.

    Outside of the US, the IBM BlueGene/P system at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany got top honors, ranking sixth overall.

    The top supercomputer in the UK was an IBM PowerPC cluster located at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading. That system ranked 18th overall.

(Agencies)