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.

IBM's Blue Gene has retained its position as the most powerful computer in the world.

Sun Microsystems has revealed its Fire Starter cluster for bioinformatics, a pre-configured hardware/software computing cluster aimed at small labs, clinical research organisations, departments within larger organisations, and other groups who have limited IT staffs and budgets.

Sun Microsystems has abruptly withdrawn from the Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium (I3C) that it helped to found in 2001.

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?

Web portal use by the research community and the popularity of grid computing are two leading trends in today's bioIT market, according to Sun Microsystems computational biology supremo Stefan Unger.

The University of Alberta, Sun Microsystems and Alberta Innovation and Science have announced they are working together to establish the Center of Excellence in Integrated NanoTools, a research centre the university hopes will make it a world leader in nanotechnology.

It seems fitting that a major theme from an IT life science conference held on the island of Manhattan involved dealing with integrating islands of research.