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 According to Intel the TeraGrid will link computers powered by more than 3,300 Intel Itanium processors. The company says the giant computer will be capable of more than 13.6 trillion calculations per second (13.6 teraflops) and will have the ability to store, access and share more than 450 trillion bytes of information.
The new machine will be more than a thousand times faster than IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, which defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
The distributed scientific computing system is part of a USD53 million award by the United States National Science Foundation to four different facilities to address complex scientific research by creating what is known as a distributed terascale facility.
The organisations involved want the TeraGrid to be accessible to researchers across the United States so that they can more quickly analyse, simulate and help solve some of the most complex scientific problems.
Examples of research areas include molecular modeling for disease detection, cures and drug discovery, automobile crash simulations, research on alternative energy sources, and climate and atmospheric simulations for more accurate weather predictions.
Dan Reed, director for NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications), said the system would be connected through a high-speed optical network, provided by Qwest, which will be the fastest open research network in the world.
Most of the supercomputer will be located at the NCSA at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. NCSA has three partners which will also deploy systems including the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago, and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
The supercomputer is expected to be available in 2002 and will include Intel's next-generation Itanium processor, codenamed McKinley, which is also due in 2002.
The NCSA is at http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.
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