BAD HARDWARE WEEK

IBM claims that its new Blue Gene/P supercomputer, operating at petaflop speed performs more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack of laptops.

The 1-petaflop Blue Gene/P comes with 294,912 processors and takes up 72 racks in all. Hitting 3 petaflops takes an 884,736-processor, 216-rack cluster, according to IBM. The chips and other components are linked together in a high-speed optical network.