The bi-annual Top 500 Supercomputing list – published twice a year by Top500. org – was released on Monday at the International Supercomputing Conference 2010 conference in Hamburg, Germany.

The top slot on the recently-released list – which essentially ranks the world’s most powerful computers - was retained by the Jaguar supercomputer installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy. The supercomputer topped the list with an enviable 1.76 petaflops of performance.

Notching up the second rank on the list was the Chinese Nebulae supercomputer, installed at China’s National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen. The Dawning-manufactured supercomputer boasts Nvidia graphics processors and Intel Xeon CPUs, which together help provide 1.27 petaflops of performance.

Nebulae’s rise on the list came at the cost of the fall of IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer from its earlier second place to the third rank. Installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Roadrunner combines dual-core AMD Opteron CPUs and IBM's Cell processors to provide over one petaflop of performance.

The top 500 list currently features 24 supercomputers in China – bringing the country at par with Germany, which holds the overall fourth rank in terms of number of computers on the supercomputing list. The top rank is held by the US - with 282 out of 500 supercomputers -; followed by the UK and France in the second and third place respectively.