Charity building 'super fast computer'

A US non-profit research organisation says it is building the world’s fastest supercomputer.

The machine, expected to be capable of 1,000 trillion operations per second when completed in 2008, is being built by the Battelle Memorial Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Battelle, which manages Oak Ridge and three other laboratories for the US Department of Energy, said the computer will eventually be 300 times faster than a similar computer in Japan, called Earth Simulator, which can perform 35.8 trillion operations per second.