The US dominates the list with 277 entries while the UK came in second with 45 ahead of Germany (27), France (25) and China (21).

While Australia has had an entry on the Top 500 list every year since 1993 it was easily surpassed in the most recent update by New Zealand's eight entries.

Coming in at 447 was HP-based supercomputer, which slipped from 227 in the June rankings and continues to slide further down the list after debuting at 87 in 2005.

The Animal Logic set up is base on HP's Cluster Platform 3000BL System Model running Linux with Intel EM64T Xeon L54xx (Harpertown) 2500 MHz (10 GFlops) processing.

The most Australia has ever had on the list is 11 entries in 2005. The highest rank was in the same year with an Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) SGI Altix system coming at number 26.