Kind of puts your Pentium 4 in a whole new light, doesn’t it? :-(

IBM’s Blue Gene/L became the top contender to the supercomputing throne Thursday, when Big Blue announced that a new incarnation of the machine can perform 70.7 trillion calculations per second.

The speed of 70.7 teraflops, as expected, puts Blue Gene/L well ahead of the 42.7 teraflops Silicon Graphics Inc. announced in October for its Columbia system, as well as the 51.9 teraflops that the full Columbia configuration is expected to be able to reach. The companies are vying for the top spot in a list of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers. The list will be updated Monday.

In addition, the new speed definitively bested a Japanese system, NEC’s Earth Simulator, that has led the Top500 list for two years. The Blue Gene/L lead could increase when the system quadruples in size from its current configuration with 16 racks and more than 16,000 dual-core processors. The improvement will be made by May, IBM says.