The race is on to make supercomputers as powerful as possible, exascale-class computers capable of a million trillion calculations per second, to solve some of the world's most important problems, including climate change, the need for ultra-long-life batteries for cars, operating fusion reactors with plasma that reaches 150 million degrees Celsius and creating bio-fuels from weeds and not corn.

Saudi Arabia is building a supercomputer that could rank among the 10 most powerful systems in the world. And the country isn't stopping there. It has plans to turn this marquee system for the Middle East into a petascale system in two years, and, beyond that, an exascale system.

The PC industry's two largest graphics companies released new top-of-the-line models this week. The new graphics processors will bring not just better videogame performance, but will also turn ordinary desktop PCs into the equivalent of supercomputers -- if programmers can figure out how to take advantage of the chips' massively parallel architectures.

The world's climate modellers are drawing up plans for a global supercomputing center with computing power of 100 petaflops that would provide detailed local forecasts of future climate change, with the intent of generating useful forecasts of water supply, droughts, health, and future food supply.

Japanese researchers have demonstrated laser communications chips capable of transfering information through optical fibers at a record 25 gigabits per second, a development that could lead to the first petaflop-class supercomputer by 2010.

A global race is under way to reach the next milestone in supercomputer performance, many times the speed of today's most powerful machines. And beyond the customary rivalry in the field between the United States and Japan, there is a new entrant - China - eager to showcase its arrival as an economic powerhouse.

Japan has revealed plans to build a supercomputer so staggeringly powerful that it will be five times swifter than the 500 fastest systems on the planet today – combined.

An experimental supercomputer made from hardware that can reconfigure itself to tackle different software problems is being built by researchers in Scotland. The supercomputer will be more powerful and efficient than a conventional system of similar physical size and f it can be made easy enough to program, it could usher in a new generation of compact and energy-saving supercomputers over the coming decade.

The ability to build powerful computers cheaply, combined with growing commercial demand for high-end computing power, is creating a renaissance in the field of supercomputing.

Researchers at the University of San Francisco are experimenting with what they are calling "flash mob supercomputing" by organizing hundreds of participants to gather and hook their personal computers together into a supercomputer.