Super Computers

was reading an article on rediff about IBM's latest super computer, Blue Gene/L. claimed to be the fastest, its speed is in the order of 36 teraflops. thats 36 trillion calculation per sec, something really amazing.
I have previously worked on a super computer cluster, Blue Horizon, remotely ofcourse. it was located at the San Diego Super Computing Center, also called SDSC. this was for a course work while at UCSB. Blue Horizon's peak performance was about 1.7 teraflops. it was a mind blowing speed.... what took more than 10 mins on our local linux cluster, about 10-15 2Ghz machines, took less than a sec on the blue horizon. I could only imagine how much faster this new one could be :)
by the way, its not that hard to get an access to some super computers meant for academic purposes. you just need a project that justifies the use of massive computing power.