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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's supercomputer has been ranked in the top 10 on the top 500 list of the world's fastest computers for a third consecutive time since the computer went online last year. The computer at the Department of Energy lab dropped four slots to No. 9 from a peak of No. 5 in last fall's rankings. Scott Studham, PNNL associate director for advanced computing, said the drop did not come as a surprise and that he was pleased to remain in the top 10. The list, compiled by Top 500 Supercomputer Sites, rated PNNL's Hewlett-Packard cluster of nearly 2,000 Intel-powered processors at 11.6 teraflops, or a trillion "floating point operations" per second, the standard used for measuring computational speed. (The complete list and more detailed ranking criteria are at http://www.top500.org .) Such power is necessary for the supercomputer's 500 university and government-agency users, who run complex environmental, chemical and biological simulations. The supercomputer is housed at the W.R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, located at PNNL. For more information about the EMSL computing facility, see http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/capabs/mscf.shtml. For more information about the supercomputer, see http://www.intel.com/ebusiness/pdf/affiliates/pnnl0244.pdf PNNL (www.pnl.gov ) is a DOE Office of Science laboratory that solves complex problems in energy, national security, the environment and life sciences by advancing the understanding of physics, chemistry, biology and computation. PNNL employs 3,800, has a $600 million annual budget, and has been managed by Ohio-based Battelle since the lab's inception in 1965.