A new computer built by IBM was unveiled yesterday at a research laboratory in California. The US$110 million computer — named “ASCI White” — is the fastest computer in the world at present and is being used to simulate the explosion of a nuclear bomb. The computer fills the space of a couple of basketball courts, weighs as much as 17 elephants and can process 12.3 trillion calculations per second — or as IBM puts it, “(it) can do in a second what a calculator would take 10 million years.”
