In order to help produce the next breakthroughs in biotechnology, cosmology, and meteorology, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois will upgrade its IT infrastructure early next year. The pièce de resistance: a supercomputing cluster consisting of 12 IBM Power4 p690 servers able to perform at 2 teraflops--2 trillion operations per second.

Researchers apply to the NCSA for access to its computing power, which lets them perform complex calculations. The clustered architecture works well for applications that require a lot of processing power, agency director Dan Reed says. Goodness knows, researchers trying to understand the origins of the universe need as much computing power as they can get.