Pepsi’s Indra Nooyi, Citibank’s Vikram Pandit and steel world’s Lakshmi Mittal, are amongst a few names who have proved there mettle all over the world. The extent to which desis have made an impact in the US was reeled off in the Rajya Sabha  — as many as 12% scientists and 38% doctors in the US are Indians, and in NASA, 36% or almost 4 out of 10 scientists are Indians.

If that’s not  enough digest this: 34% employees at Microsoft, 28% at IBM, 17% at Intel and 13% at Xerox are Indians.

And the House of Elders also heard some startling facts about a country that’s still stuck with a Third World tag — 20% of gold in the world is used by Indians and nine out of 10 diamonds used in the world are made in India.

Cray bragged that their updated Jaguar XT supercomputer was the world’s fastest. Now in the mont of November, IBM  Roadrunner system toppled Cray in the newly published Top500 supercomputing list.

Both the IBM and Cray systems break the petaflop processing barrier according to Top500 measurements (1.45 petaflops vs 1.38 petaflops, respectively). Heck, even IBM admitted to us that the two computers “run neck and neck.”

But there is a major difference …

The Roadrunner uses roughly half the power of the Jaguar XT.

It assembles 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell Broadband Engine processors and an additional 6,948 AMD Opteron Dual-Core processors. The AMD equipment handles “basic” functions while the IBM chips handle the intense number crunching.

Seeing as the Cray XT5 uses 45,000 quad-core AMD Opteron processors to get the same job done, you’ve gotta be at least a little impressed.