IBM and the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory said Wednesday that they will work together to build and operate a massive supercomputer that will help research the causes of diseases.

The agreement covers IBM's "Blue Gene" project, an effort to build a massive supercomputer capable of more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second, or 1 petaflop. That's 80 times faster than today's most powerful computer, IBM's ASCI White, which is used to simulate nuclear explosions at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore laboratories in California. Blue Gene should cost more than $100 million to construct and is expected to be completed by 2003.

Under the agreement, scientists at Oak Ridge will help IBM design and program the computer to model the complex three-dimensional folding of proteins in the human body. That will lead to a better understanding of what causes diseases. Blue Gene will also be used by other partners to study areas such as nanotechnology and climate change.

Betsy Riley, an operations manager at Oak Ridge, says corporations and the government cooperate often on supercomputing projects because they tackle the "grand challenges" of science. "The government laboratories have the problems of critical national importance that need this computing power," she says. "We're looking at problems that need more processing power than is currently available."

Riley says consumers benefit not only from the labs' discoveries, but also from the technology involved. Says Riley, "The advances that are made in supercomputing and high-end computing filter their way down to the consumer market."