Celera Genomics (Rockville, MD), Compaq Computer (Houston, TX), and the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratory (Albuquerque, NM) agreed on January 19 to design a new computer capable of performing 100 trillion operations per second to better study the function, structure, and interactions of proteins in humans and other organisms. The four-year project will see Compaq and Sandia collaborate on the development of systems hardware and software, while Celera and Sandia will develop algorithms and visualization technologies for analyzing the large amounts of data. Compaq supplied Celera with the computers to produce a rough draft of the human genome in 2000 (Nat. Biotechnol. 18, 810, 2000).