Wheat stem rust, an inexorable pathogen of Australia's wheat belt since 1925, is destined to be run over by the genetic equivalent of a four-decker bus.

Blue Gene -- IBM's highly touted petaFLOP protein-folding supercomputer -- is still at least three years away from scheduled completion in 2006, but project managers say they have achieved some significant milestones. But will gains in other high-performance computing areas, notably clustering, make the system obsolete by the time it's ready to be unveiled?