Computer giant IBM has announced a $100 million initiative to build the world's fastest supercomputer, developing an entirely new computer architecture that IBM says will be designed specifically to study three-dimensional protein folding. The new computer, dubbed “Blue Gene,” will be 1,000 times faster than the company's previous cutting-edge supercomputer Deep Blue, a project that made headlines by becoming the first computer to defeat world chess champion Garri Kasparov in 1997 (Nature Biotechnol 15, 489). Ambuj Goyal, vice president of computer science at IBM Research (Yorktown Heights, NY), said that “a tremendous gain in performance will be made possible by the first major revolution in how computers are built since the mid-1980s.” Goyal is referring to Blue Gene's planned “self-healing” hardware and software that will facilitate progressive searches for better solutions to a problem, and automaticly re-route data when a fault occurs in the system. Spin-off technologies from Blue Gene, which is expected to take about five years to build, are expected to help solve other problems in bioinformatics, such as interpreting gene expression profiles and mapping single-nucleotide polymorphisms.