The next supercomputer will deal in petaflops--that means thousands of trillions of FLOPS, or floating point operations per second. That's a lot--an order of magnitude faster than any existing computer.
Compaq, together with Sandia National Laboratories and Celera Genomics, expects to build the new computer by 2004. The current leader in supercomputer design is IBM, who made the faster computer available today.
The supercomputer will help "to advance the knowledge from the human genome to improve human health," said Sandia President Paul Robinson. "Nothing beats the complexity of the Human Genome Project and the opportunities ahead. We look forward to working in these fields."
