As expected, Virginia Tech’s “Big Mac” supercomputer cluster, built with 1,100 Power Mac G5s, officially ranks third among the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers. The US$5.2 million system, officially named “X,” ranked No. 3 with a performance of 10.3 trillion calculations per second, or 10.3 teraflops. The No. 1 and No. 2 systems were Japan’s Earth Simulator and Los Alamos National Laboratory’s ASCI Q with performance of 35.6 teraflops and 13.8 teraflops, respectively. The results were released today in the Top500, a twice-a-year list of the world’s 500 fastest machines.