IBM building world's biggest computer

IBM is constructing the world's biggest and most powerful super-computer -­ the size of a tennis court - to serve the needs of the biotechnology industry.

The machine, dubbed "Blue Gene", will take four years to build and the finished product will be 100 times more powerful than the current title holder ASCI White, which is also built by IBM.

The new machine is costing $US100 million ($238 million) to construct and will eventually fill a room the size of a tennis court.

Since the discovery of genetic code, the biotechnology industry has been producing unprecedented volumes of computer data. But now that the human genome has been fully mapped, the difficult part has just begun.

The new challenge is to analyse and process all of the genetic information in order to study the causes and possible cures of disease.

But all of this is generating a vast demand for raw computing power, and the IT industry is having to produce bigger and faster machines in order to meet it.

To this end, IBM built ASCI White, a computer about the size of a football pitch capable of performing 12 thousand billion calculations a second, which is three times as powerful as the next biggest computer in existence.

Supercomputers are an area dominated by IBM, as 215 of the world's 500 biggest computers are built by the company.

But even ASCI is reaching its limits. The biotechnology industry is advancing into massive new areas of research, the most significant of which is the study of proteins and the way they behave.

Unlike genes, which merely define our make-up, proteins are the cells that dictate the way everything actually works. There are tens of thousands of proteins and each can undergo millions of possible reactions.

Accordingly, in order to monitor and analyse all this, the industry needs a machine capable of processing these permutations quickly and efficiently.

The Blue Gene project will create a prototype computer that is capable of processing a million billion calculations per second, and is 1,000 times more powerful than the Deep Blue machine that beat the former Grand Master Gary Kasparov at chess in 1997.

The Blue Gene machine is particularly aimed at the biotechnology industry, and it marks an important shift in the demands on computer power.

In the past, nuclear physics and astrophysics were the big customers, but even they do not produce the same vast quantities of data as yielded by a single strip of human chromosome.

- INDEPENDENT