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July 6, 2008 8:47:35 AM CDT

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World's Fastest Computer on the Fast Track

Posted Sep 26, 07 1:32 PM CDT in Technology    Editor's Choice

(Newser) – IBM is set to begin work on a computer capable of a quadrillion calculations per second, more power than a mile-high tower of laptops. McClatchy Newspapers reports the system will use 884,736 processors—six times the current best—to analyze problems on a dizzying scale. “We're on a path to a time when computers will be smarter than people,” one executive said.

The goal in a race involving IBM, Japanese and French outfits is the petaflop—one quadrillion (that is, 1,000 trillion) calculations per second. The Japanese predict their computer will hit the 10-petaflop mark by 2012, outpacing IBM’s projection of 2017. But programmers aren’t sure how to harness the machines; they're inspired by video games, whose coding handles many simultaneous calculations.

Source McClatchy Newspapers

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At Argonne National Laboratory, 25 miles outside Chicago, engineers are poised to create a machine more than triple the speed of the world's fastest computer.   (Wikimedia Commons)
"We're working on it already," said a spokesman from IBM. "We're on a path to a time when computers will be smarter than people."   (Wikimedia Commons)
The Blue Gene/P is set to dethrone its predecessor the Blue Gene/L, seen here. Blue Gene/L edged out the Japanese supercomputer, the Earth Simulator, for the world record in 2004.   (User: Raul654; Wikimedia Commons)
Lloyd Slonaker, a computer engineer at the Major Shared Resource Center of the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, checks over one of the 72 computer nodes of the new...   (Associated Press)
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