Inside a long, low sliver of glass and steel in upstate New York, the world’s most powerful computer is taking shape. It will consist of 256 cube-shaped racks laid out on a 16-by-16 grid. Each rack will contain four circuit boards, each of which will have 36 chips mounted on it. Each of these chips, in turn, will contain 32 processors, each one equivalent in computing power to one of today’s fastest desktop PCs. The resulting supercomputer, which is called Blue Gene and is being constructed by IBM at its Thomas J Watson research centre, will thus consist of a total of 1.2m processors. Collectively, they will be capable of performing a million billion operations per second, making Blue Gene over 100 times faster than any computer yet built.
And what will this computer be used for when it is finally switched on, sometime in 2003? The answer is surprising. It will not be put to work modelling nuclear explosions, forecasting the weather, cracking codes or analysing collisions between galaxies. Instead, it will be used for biological research.
Although astronomers, meteorologists, mathematicians and physicists have been using computers ever since they were invented, biologists have not. In part, this is because biology does not yield to mathematical abstraction in the way that other sciences do. At least, it did not until recently. But biologists are now drowning in genomic data. The sequencing of the human genome is the best known example; but the gene sequences of other organisms, from bacteria to mice, are also spewing into databases. In order to make sense of it all, biologists need computers-big ones.
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