PROCESSORS

A US research organization is building the world's fastest supercomputer. The system, expected to be capable of 1000 trillion operations a second when completed in 2008, is being built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. A spokesman for Battelle Memorial Institute, the world's largest independent, non-profit research organization, said the supercomputer would be 300 times faster than a similar computer in Japan called Earth Simulator. Earth Simulator can perform 35.8 trillion operations a second. Applications will include medical research and studying weather patterns and black holes.