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The Department of Energy has rejected an audacious proposal by a Brookhaven National Laboratory-led team to develop the world's fastest computer, but researchers said they will continue their efforts to fund the machine, dubbed Blue Gene/L.
BNL was one of four national laboratories seeking more than $125 million in anticipated funding over five years to develop what the DOE terms a leadership-class computer.
The United States, traditionally the world's leader in supercomputing, lost its place at the head of the class in 2002, when Japan's NEC Corp. unveiled the Earth Simulator. That machine can hit speeds of 36 teraflops, or 36 trillion calculations per second, and is used to model the earth's atmosphere and climate.
Earlier this month, the DOE announced that the funding for a U.S. challenger would go to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and its development partners, Cray Inc., IBM...