Itanium powers NASA supertin box

The $50 million machine is a cluster of 20 computers built by NASA's Ames Research Center. It was built using 20 SGI Altix systems and has 10,240 512 Intel Itanium 2 processors. In tests that used just 16 of the 20 installed systems, it deduced the existence of rice pudding* and managed 42.7 trillion calculations per second.

The current world's fastest is Japan's Earth Simulator, which has sustained performance of 35.86 teraflops.

We are not sure about the project's name though. The NASA boffins have decided to call it Project Columbia, named after the space shuttle that was destroyed early last year.

One news source reckoned that that a person doing one calculation per second by hand would need a million years to do what the Project Columbia system can do in a single second.

This is assuming that they are able to continuously reincarnate in the same spot and mystically be drawn into the task, a feat which has not been managed yet by the Tibetan Dalai. µ

* Guest joke courtesy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.