Oh, for crying out loud; when Virginia Tech said that it thought it might be able to improve its G5-based supercomputer's performance of 7.41 teraflops before next month's official list of the top 500 supercomputers is finalized, we didn't think they meant every frickin' day. As you already know, the 7.41 score was reported by the New York Times on Tuesday; on Wednesday the same guy who told the Times about the 7.41 score had already published a paper stating that Big Mac had climbed to 8.164 teraflops. Well, guess what? Yup.

Faithful viewer mrmgraphics pointed us towards an Information Week article reporting that Big Mac is now zipping along at a fairly staggering 8.7 teraflops-- which, unless other scores have changed in the past two days, bests the 8.633 teraflops achieved by the highest-ranking Intel-based supercomputer: a new Itanium 2 cluster that, as of two days ago, was beating Big Mac down into fourth place. Now, however, it looks like the two have traded places, which, if true, means that the world's first and only Mac-based supercomputer has beaten out everything Intel has yet slapped together, and for a mere $5.2 million or so. Spiffy.

So let's see... at this rate, by the time we get back after the weekend, Big Mac ought to be up to a solid 10 teraflops by Monday. Give it another week and a half and it'll be 14 teraflops or so, vaulting it from third place into second (sorry, ASCI Q AlphaServer EV-68 with 8,160 1.25 GHz processors and a Quadrics interconnect subsystem; enjoy the stay in Threeville), and by the time the final numbers are in later in November, we assume that Big Mac will have more than doubled its theoretical peak to rest at 36 terabytes, finally eclipsing even Japan's mighty $350 million Earth Simulator.

Hey, it could happen.

Well, okay, no, it couldn't. But third place is nothing to sneeze at, and even if Big Mac has no shot at the silver or gold, the higher its score, the better-- for Virginia Tech, for Apple, and for Mac lovers everywhere. The whole world is watching...