The announced this week that the latest implementation of the XT Jaguar supercomputer at its in Oak Ridge, Tenn., has hit a peak performance of 1.64 petaflops, or more than a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second. Last June, a sustained speed of 1.026 petaflops and a few weeks later it was officially crowned the fastest computer in the world when it made the top spot on the of supercomputers.

the first machine to pass the petaflop barrier and industry watchers said it was akin to the first runner breaking the four-minute mile. However, they also noted that other companies, like Cray, were right on IBM's heels and aiming to cross the petaflop threshold as well.

Steve Scott, chief technology officer of Cray, told Computerworld that the world will find out next week whether XT Jaguar, which runs a Linux-based operating system, has captured the title of world's fastest computer when the is unveiled at the Supercomputing Conference in Austin, Texas. He noted that while the Cray machine surpassed Roadrunner's numbers from last June, the IBM machine, which is operating at , could have been upgraded since then.

Scott said that Cray engineers have been upgrading the scalable Jaguar machine at the Oak Ridge lab since 2004. The scalable supercomputer now has 362 terabytes of memory and a 10-petabyte file system.

This fall Cray developers added 200 cabinets, taking the system from 84 cabinets to 284, according to Scott. Each cabinet can hold up to 192 separate Advanced Micro Devices Inc. quad-core Opteron chips. The entire machine runs 45,000 chips which adds up to 180,000 processors, Scott noted.