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COMPUTERS
JAPAN HAS hung on to bragging rights for the word's fastest supercomputer for more than two years now. That's not too surprising since its top-rated machine-the Earth Simulator (ES)-debuted at a speed faster than the combined power of the 20 fastest U.S. supercomputers at that time. The ES can crunch numbers at a mind-boggling 35.9 teraflops -or 35.9 trillion calculations per second. The latest listing of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers-compiled by Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, with colleagues from Germany's University of Mannheim and the...