Beep Beep!

IBM has won a US$110-million contract to build the world's first petaflops supercomputer, which will run a thousand trillion computations a second. Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico commissioned the machine, known as Roadrunner, to simulate nuclear explosions. When completed in 2008, Roadrunner will cut calculation times from months to weeks, according to John Hopson, Los Alamos's director for simulations. The current holder of the speed record, Blue Gene/L, is also an IBM machine — housed at rival weapons lab Lawrence Livermore in California. Hopson says Blue Gene/L's architecture makes it inefficient at running some types of weapon simulation. Roadrunner will use a more conventional architecture, achieving its speed by brute force and the use of specialized coprocessors — some of which were originally designed for PlayStation 3 games consoles.

Pill pushers

China's Development and Reform Commission has released plans for an invigorated drug industry. In the next five years, 5% of income from pharmaceutical sales will be reinvested in research and development. China's 5,000 or so drug companies currently invest an average of only 1% in research. This is partly because many of the firms are small, and because profit margins are low for a lot of their products — there are 300 aspirin makers in the country. Pharmaceutical companies in the United States, by comparison, typically invest 16% of revenue in research and development. The Chinese commission says it hopes to see five companies with sales of 5 billion yuan (US$600 million) a year by 2010. Specific targets include the production of 10 to 15 new drugs and vaccines for infectious diseases, and the commercialization of 20 to 30 traditional Chinese medicines.