Acid-Lounge.com

Nasa is making a bid to join the elite group using supercomputers whose power is measured in petaflops.

By 2009 the US space agency aims to be running a petaflop supercomputer that will be able to do 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

By 2012 it hopes to have boosted the power of this machine to 10 petaflops, to help with modelling and simulation.

If it manages the feat, it will be one of only a few organisations that can tap such vast number-crunching power.

The supercomputer will be installed at Nasa's Ames Research Center at Moffet Field, California, the site of its existing supercomputer facility. Nasa's current top supercomputer, called Columbia, was turned on in 2004 and has a theoretical peak of 88.88 teraflops. This makes it the 20th most powerful supercomputer on the planet, according to the Top 500 Project which compiles a list of the relative performance of these machines.