Wired reports that Virginia Tech’s “Big Mac” supercomputer cluster, which uses 1,100 Power Mac G5s, could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the planet, according to preliminary numbers. “The Big Mac’s final score on the Linpack Benchmark won’t be officially revealed until Nov. 17, when the rankings of the Top 500 supercomputer sites are made known at the International Supercomputer Conference. But Jack Dongarra, one of the compilers of a Top 500 list, said Tuesday that preliminary numbers submitted to him suggest Big Mac could be ranked as high as second place… The Big Mac’s theoretical peak is 17.6 teraflops, which would easily put it in second place behind Japan’s Earth Simulator, a monster machine composed of more than 5,000 processors operating at 35.6 trillion calculations per second.”