Baker, a computer system for the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory that should be operational by 2008 - would be three times faster than today's most powerful computer, Blue Gene/L, run by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Blue Gene/L currently runs at about 350 teraflops (350 trillion floating-point operations per second) but plans to also reach 1 petaflop by 2008. A petaflop is 1 quadrllion floating-point operations per second. The human brain is estimated to be capable of 10.

"We're entering new realm of scientific discovery, where we are looking at things at a much smaller scale. Computing expands upon our understanding of the natural world," Zacharia said. "Greater computer capacity allows researchers tackle more complex problems."