A University of Toronto supercomputer still in the process of being built was powerful enough already to make a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

The computer, being built by IBM and the University of Toronto's SciNet Consortium, was ranked the 53rd fastest supercomputer worldwide and the top system in Canada, according to a Top 500 list compiled twice annually by a group of researchers in the U.S. and Europe.

The supercomputer, when fully built, will eventually be able to perform 360 trillion calculations per second. But in its current unfinished state it is still capable of performing 48.93 trillion calculations, or floating point operations, which was good enough to almost crack the Top 50 of the list.

Floating point operations per second, or "flops," is a measure of computer performance using floating point numbers instead of integers. Floating point numbers are numbers where the decimal point position is a separate piece of data within the number. This allows for a wider range of data to be stored, but also means computers take longer to perform calculations than they would with simple integers.

When the University of Toronto supercomputer is finished — the main computing systems should be fully operational by the summer of 2009, IBM said — it will be among the 20 most powerful in the world, IBM said when announcing the project in August.

The supercomputer will be put to work on a number of research projects, including research in climate change prediction, medical imaging, aerospace, astrophysics, chemical physics, and the ATLAS project, an international investigation in particle physics that will study the collisions in the Swiss-based Large Hadron Collider.

The other Canadian computer to make the Top 500 was an IBM-built computer in use at Environment Canada. Its high speed clocked in at 21.55 trillion floating point operations per second, or 21.55 teraflops. It ranked 154th on the list.

An IBM-built supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory — nicknamed Roadrunner — capable of 1.105 petaflops was again named the fastest after first topping the list in June 2008.

A petaflop equals one-quadrillion floating point operations per second, or 100,000 times faster than a home computer.