By Xinhua
Beijing : Scientists unveiled a new generation of supercomputers, including a machine with the memory of 200,000 home computers and a hard disk hefty enough to hold the entire Google index of the internet, media reported Wednesday.
   They made the announcement Tuesday at the International Supercomputer conference in Dresden, Germany.
   The huge devices, each costing tens of millions of dollars, will compete against each other this year for the title of the planet's biggest electronic brains.
   The first contender, Constellation, has been built by Sun Microsystems at a cost of 59 million U.S. dollars and boasts a 1.7 petabytes hard disk.    Â
   The machine – which will go live later this year – can operate at speeds of 421 teraflops, or 421 trillion calculations a second. This will outstrip IBM's 280 Teraflop Blue Gene/L, currently ranked as the world's fastest computer, by some distance.
   "We have reached unprecedented cost performance for scientific computing," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, chief architect and co-founder of Sun.
   IBM also took the stage in Dresden to announce its forthcoming plan to build the latest Blue Gene computer, dubbed "P". Blue Gene/P is expected to be almost three times more powerful than its predecessor, and will run continuously at speeds of around 1 petaflop — one quadrillion calculations a second. It is also claimed to be more energy efficient than its rivals.
   The first P machine will start being put into operation by the U.S. department of energy by the end of 2007, and will be followed by research institutes in Germany.