Niwa supercomputer ranked 287th

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research's new supercomputer at Evans Bay has been ranked the 287th most powerful in the world by an independent United States organisation.

The institute bought the $12.7 million IBM computer in August and will use it to study climate change.

Weta Digital was the other Wellington supercomputer-owner to make the rankings. It operates more than 1500 Hewlett-Packard double-density blade servers, according to the list's compilers. They have been used to create effects for Avatar and other productions.

Weta's banks of blade servers were counted as seven computers, five of which were among the world's 200 most powerful. Combined, they have a processing power of 206 Teraflops (trillion floating point operations a second), which would have ranked as the world's 16th most powerful supercomputer.