IBM, SGI And NEC Are Setting The Pace, But Many Join Race; Supercomputers Made Easy; Clustering, standard parts result in slew of startups in high-performance sector.(INTERNET & TECHNOLOGY)

Publication: Investor's Business Daily

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.

Byline: KEN SPENCER BROWN

Building a supercomputer is a lot easier than it used to be.

Since 2002, NEC's Earth Simulator reigned as the world's fastest computer. It lost that crown in September to IBM's Blue Gene/L.

IBM's machine, built for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Northern California, edged out the Japanese champ at 36 trillion calculations per second, or 36 teraflops.

Big Blue held the honor for less than a month before SGI usurped it last month with its 42.7 teraflop Columbia system for NASA's Ames Research Center.

A week later, SGI lost its bragging rights as IBM upgraded Blue Gene to reach 70.72 teraflops.

The credit for these records goes to clustering, a technique of stringing lots of small machines to make one...

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