NEC today announced that their renewed Earth Simulator System, Japan’s most famous supercomputer, now achieves a peak performance of 131 TFLOPS (131 trillion calculations per second. This is up from the 35 TFLOPS that made the same system the world’s fastet computer back in 2002.

The Earth Simulator System is currently being used by the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology, mainly for predicting developments in global warming  and similar meteorological calculations. It achieves sustained performance of 122.4 TFLOPS and boasts a computing efficiency of 93.38% on the LINPACK Benchmark, the highest in the world.

But although the system is based on the world’s fastest CPU (102.4 GFLOPS), the title of fastest supercomputer in the world belongs to IBM’s Roadrunner, which features 1 petaflop performance (1 quadrillion calculations per second). The NEC supercomputer was ranked 73, but this was back in November 2008, when the last “hit list” of supercomputers was released.