They said they could do it, and Japanese research outfit Riken have lived up to their boasts by running the MDGrape-3 supercomputer at the speed of one petaflop – that’s one quadrillion instructions per second, kicking IBM’s Blue Gene to the kerb. And not just with performance – the ‘Grape cost almost a tenth of the price of Big Blue’s behemoth to build, and uses far less processor units.