Virginia Tech’s G5-powered System X now ranks 7th among the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers. The university’s supercomputer, now built from 1,100 dual 2.3GHz Xserve G5s, ranked 3rd in last year’s list when it was composed of 1,100 dual 2GHz Power Mac G5s. It should be noted, however, that the rebuilt System X performs 20 percent faster than the previous cluster. The drop was due to new submissions on the supercomputer ranking list. The 24th TOP500 List, which was released today during SC2004 in Pittsburgh, PA, shows that IBM’s BlueGene/L beta-System was able to claim the No. 1 position with its record Linpack benchmark performance of 70.72 teraflops. It was followed by the Columbia system built by SGI (51.87 teraflops) and the Earth Simulator supercomputer built by NEC (35.86 teraflops).