Supercomputer: tera-bly intelligent

A supercomputer, able to do in one second what it would take a human with a calculator 10 million years to achieve, could be running next summer.

The National Science Board has approved a $53m grant to build a supercomputer, named TeraGrid, to help researchers model diseases and predict earthquakes.

The Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF), will connect four IBM computer centres across the US to form one grid with the ability to process 13.6 trillion calculations per second.

This would take a person using a calculator 10 million years to process.

Dan Reed, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, said: "This will transform the way science and research is done."

Teragrid will comprise of a grid of computing resources to allow researches to tap into the system in much the same way that consumers draw electricity from a power grid.

IBM will provide over 1,000 servers using Intel's Itanium McKinley microprocessors, and the Linux operating system.

It will have a storage capacity of 600 terabytes, or the equivalent of 146m full-length novels. All of this will be hooked up to a 40GB per second Qwest Communications network.

The supercomputers will be connected using open source protocols from Globus, which is an organisation looking to set up grid standards similar to those used to run the web.

DTF will be over a thousand times faster than IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, which defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.