A research director at Los Alamos National Laboratories said the addition of a peta-scale supercomputer is as big a leap forward as when scientists got their hands on their first computer ever.

Engineers and technicians at IBM are assembling the final pieces of what they hope will soon become the world's most powerful supercomputer - doubling the speed of the today's fastest machine.

IBM's Blue Gene/L is still the fastest, but Blue Gene/P is on its mark.

For the 12th straight year, IBM has topped the list of companies receiving US patents, according to an annual report published Tuesday by a unit of the Dutch information services company WoltersKluwer.

The German government is to launch D-Grid, an initiative to promote a grid-based communication framework for scientific research, at the Global Grid Forum in Berlin today.

Software developers Optive Research and Synthematix have joined the Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium (I3C).

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has agreed to buy 35 inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometer (ICP-MS) systems for about US$9 million for use in state and local health laboratories to upgrade preparations for and response to bioterrorism, infectious disease outbreaks and other public health threats and emergencies.

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?

The land of the red 'roo is a long hop from just about everywhere else in the world, so travel costs loomed large in Dr Phil Batterham's analysis of the cost of staging the world's largest genefest in Melbourne next year.

Biotechnology will reach its potential only if companies involved in related markets collaborate and focus on standards-based technologies rather than proprietary work, said Michael Capellas, chairman and chief executive officer of Compaq, on Thursday.