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Supercomputers can cost millions of dollars.
But it can't compete with IBM's work in progress, Blue Gene, unless it's ten times that fast. Blue Gene will speed along at 1,000 teraflops and will also be used to attack biological problems. IBM, which dominates the annual list of the top 500 supercomputers, announced that it was building the machine in 1999 and, like the new Compaq-Celera collaboration, it will be ready by 2004. It's a race. Celera's business plan relies on developing the best databases of medical information, and it needs supercomputers to do that.