Setting the Supercomputing Standard.

Want some good news? NASA and its partners, Silicon Graphics and Intel, have pretty much obliterated exisiting supercomputing standards, both for power and speed of construction. The Columbia supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., built in just 15 weeks, has achieved sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second. And that's with only 16 of its planned 20 systems installed.