IBM has launched the world's fastest commercial supercomputer which is three times more potent than the current fastest machine. The latest high powered machine is able to work at petaflop speeds and approximately 100,000 times more powerful than a PC, with the first machine being bought by the US government. The CPU of choice in the machine is the CELL as used in the PS3.

By comparison the standard one petaflop Blue Gene/P comes with 294,912-processors connected by a high-speed, optical network.

However, it can be expanded to pack 884,736 processors, a configuration that would allow the machine to compute 3,000 trillion calculations per second (three petaflops).

"Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has ever known," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing, IBM.