And that's pretty freaking fast!

US mega computer

... The NSF estimates that it would take one person with a calculator about 10 million years to tabulate the number of calculations the proposed grid could complete in a single second.

Each of the four sites participating in the DTF project will operate a Linux cluster, which will work with two existing clusters, already in use at the NCSA, to make up the Teragrid.

In a clustered computer, many relatively low-powered processors are harnessed together to make a more powerful machine. Scientific problems are split up and the parts of the machine work on them individually.

The four labs collaborating to create the Teragrid are:
National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois
San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California
Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago;
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

The DTF will boast some 600 terabytes of data storage, the equivalent of 146 million full-length novels, and is due to be in service in 2002.

The clustered supercomputer will be used to study problems in biology, genomics, astronomy and do realistic simulations of such diverse events as car crashes and the way that proteins fold to deepen our understanding of these subjects.

Once complete the DTF will beat the previous most powerful supercomputer in terms of calculations per second. The IBM ASCI White system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is capable of 7.2 teraflops, almost half the capability of the DTF when it is running flat out....