By 2010 supercomputers could be carrying out more than 1,000 trillion calculations per second. The ambitious goal has been set by the US Government to help its scientists tackle problems that would otherwise take too long to simulate.
Supercomputing speeds continue to rise, with yesterday's fastest machines buried by today's speed kings, but when will supercomputers reach their limits? Most experts agree that current barriers to supercomputing speeds -- which are approaching hundreds of teraflops -- will fall. A teraflop equals 1 trillion floating point operations per second.
China's first supercomputer which is capable of making 1.027 trillion calculations per second has been unveiled in Zhongguancun, the "Silicon Valley" of Beijing.
Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington, argues that the Bush Administration's decision to lower the barriers on the export supercomputers has given terrorists and rogue states the tools they need to build nuclear weapons.
Recent advances in genomics and the plummeting cost of supercomputer power have made it possible for "garage hobbyists" to tinker with human and animal genomes.
A Japanese laboratory has built the world's fastest computer, a machine so powerful that it matches the raw processing power of the 20 fastest American computers combined and far outstrips the previous leader, an I.B.M.-built machine.
In June, a computer its creators call the most powerful ever built for commercial use (and the fifth most powerful in the world) will go online in Los Angeles. The machine, as yet unnamed, will be dedicated to one goal: beating Wall Street.
The persistent theft of components from one of Britain's largest academic super- computers is taking a sinister turn. A scientist is warning that thieves might be selling the computer's brainpower to Iraq or al-Qaida for clandestine weapons research.
IBM has announced it is building a massive supercomputer that will have the ability to repair itself, and keep itself running without human intervention. The supercomputer, code named 'Blue Sky', is being assembled for The National Center for Atmospheric Research and will be capable of predicting atmospheric climate changes, heating oil prices, and global warming.
This week marks the launching of a new supercomputer that brings everything from clusters of galaxies to complex molecules within computational reach. The Terascale Computing System (TCS) at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is the second most powerful computer in the world, after ASCI White at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.