What do video games and seismic explorations have in common" Both require very demanding computer applications that call for the ability to process massive quantities of data rapidly. Using computer technology originally co-designed by IBM for video-game consoles, University of Houston seismic researchers are employing this extremely fast technology to more effectively target oil reserves.

Supercomputers keep growing ever faster, racing along at the blazing speed of nearly one petaflops – 10 to the fifteenth, or one thousand trillion calculations per second – equivalent to around 250 thousand of today’s laptops. In contrast, the experience of a computational scientist can be anything but fast -- waiting hours or days in a queue for a job to run and yield precious results needed for further steps.

Scientist from the Niels Bohr Institute at University of Copenhagen and from Harvard University have worked out a new theory which describe how the necessary transistors for the quantum computers of the future may be created. The research has just been published in the scientific journal Nature Physics.

The Beijing Meteorological Bureau (BMB) announced today that it has acquired a new IBM supercomputer to aid in weather forecasting and air-quality control. The system is capable of sweeping an area up to 44,000 square kilometers to provide hourly numerical weather forecasts for each square kilometer.

Somewhere in Southern California a large earthquake strikes without warning, and the news media and the public clamor for information about the temblor - Where was the epicenter? How large was the quake? What areas did it impact?

IBM Triples Performance of World's Fastest, Most Energy-Efficient Supercomputer