After years of falling behind IBM and other companies in the race to build <A HREF="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2207492,00.asp">the world's fastest supercomputers,</A> NEC is looking to gain back some momentum with a new machine that offers 839 trillion calculations per second.

At the company's Tokyo headquarters, NEC executives unveiled the SX-9, a supercomputer that offers a peak performance of up to 839 teraflops, according to a Oct. 25 statement from the company. This supercomputer is built using a newly developed microprocessor that offers up to 102.4 gigaflops or 102.4 billion floating point operations per second on a single core.