Hoping to harness a few million of the personal computers are not already running the SETI@home screen saver, IBM and United Devices have launched a new World Community Grid project designed to act as a clearing house for humanitarian computing projects.

IBM has built a 512-node prototype of its Blue Gene L supercomputer that has been ranked as the 73rd most powerful computer in the world. The machine, which is capable of a peak performance of 2 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops), is about the size of a 30-inch TV.

The Macintosh may not be an established player is scientific computing, but Apple Computer is beginning to get some respect as a player in the space, according to the company's vice-president of software technology, Guy 'Bud' Tribble, who pitched the case for the Mac to attendees of the Biosilico 2003 conference at Stanford University last week.

Intel has launched a research project aimed at applying the same technology the chip maker uses to detect flaws in microprocessors to the field of cancer detection.