Virginia Tech's homemade supercomputer has received top honors worldwide from an organization that recognizes the year's most significant contributions to information technology.

Last fall, Virginia Tech went from obscurity to international prominence in the supercomputer world when university researchers unveiled a mammoth machine able to crunch more than 10 trillion calculations per second. The Tech creation ranked third on the list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers, released in November.

On Monday, a committee of top executives from the world's biggest technology companies named Tech's supercomputer the "best IT [information technology] application in the world in science" at the 2004 Computerworld Honors Program banquet in Washington, D.C.

Tech was selected from among more than 250 projects submitted by universities, corporations and groups in 26 countries.

"Virginia Tech is using information technology to make great strides toward remarkable social achievement in science," Daniel Morrow, executive director of the Computerworld Honors Program, said in a statement announcing the award.

"The materials submitted on behalf of Virginia Tech will enrich the program's growing collection on the Information Age, and help build an accurate record of the truly outstanding achievements being made in these remarkable times."

Virginia Tech is by no means the only American university to have a supercomputer on campus to handle the complicated calculations needed in such "big science" fields as climate simulations, molecular and biological modeling and nanoscale electronics. What made Virginia Tech's project unique was how much supercomputing power Tech created with so little money.

The original System X is actually a cluster of 1,100 Power Mac G5 computers - a model available to consumers everywhere - networked to work as a single machine. Tech was able to overcome the weak link that had plagued earlier clusters: When one computer within the network failed, the entire computation often crashed as well.

The entire project cost Tech $5.2 million - one-tenth or less of the price of many traditional mainframe supercomputers.

Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple Computer, nominated Virginia Tech for the award in recognition of the university's "contributions to the global information technology revolution and its positive impact on society," according to the release.

Srinidhi Varadarajan, director of Tech's Terascale Computing Facility, where System X is housed, said Tuesday that he was surprised to win the top award in the science category because of the quality of the competition. Varadarajan, an assistant professor of computer science, said he was particularly honored given that the award program's selection committee is made up of mainly executives from the world's top technology corporations.

Varadarajan said he is not sure where System X will rank on the next Top 500 list, which comes out later this month. Several other universities and groups are assembling new cluster supercomputers that could eclipse Tech's machine.

In the meantime, Tech is preparing to replace the original 1,100 dual-processor Apple G5s with newer versions. Varadarajan said the new Apples are easier to install, cooler to operate, easier to troubleshoot and probably much faster. But perhaps the biggest benefit is the size: The new supercomputer will only take up two aisles in the Terascale Computation Facility, instead of the current six aisles.

"So we have four more aisles to expand," he said. "We don't have to think about building a new building."