US universities unite IBM supercomputers

One trillion calculations per second... now we're talking...

Two universities in the US are using a fibre optic network to bring together the power of their IBM supercomputers to create one virtual machine capable of processing one trillion operations per second. Complex programmes are distributed across all of the processors within the computers to take full advantage of the combined processing power. Dubbed the 'Indiana Virtual Machine Room', the connected supercomputers of Indiana and Purdue universities will be used to analyse data which would be far too vast for the supercomputers individually. Researchers at the universities will use the machines to create 'synthetic environments' to ascertain such things as how people will respond to natural disasters or how certain materials behave at an atomic level.