Motivated by Japan's recent accomplishment of building the world's fastest supercomputer, this report discusses a methodology for creating "a new class of computational capability in the United States that is optimal for science." With the needs of several different scientific disciplines in mind, the report outlines the goals of the IBM Blue Gene and the proposed Blue Planet projects. Specific...

The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) division is part of the Ames Research Center Information Sciences and Technology Directorate. The NAS home page describes "leading-edge high performance computing and its role in many of NASA's critical missions for the 21st century." The site provides news and feature stories of NAS projects, but most of the site's information is in the Research & Technology...

The Super Computing Science Consortium is a partnership among university, state and Federal research organizations aimed at improving "the ability of the partners to advance energy and environment technologies through the application of high performance computing and communications (HPCC)." The website describes the organization's project on MFIX, for which it has made available open source code,...

Twice a year, the Top500 Project releases a list of the 500 sites with the most powerful supercomputers. The purpose of the list is "to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing." The latest version was unveiled in June, and this site examines some of the most important developments and newcomers to the list. Most important is the recently constructed...