The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the company Cray announced a $200 million deal in June to complete the world’s most powerful computer in 2008.

This supercomputer, that Cray already nicknames Baker, is gonna use AMD Opteron dual-core to reach a peak speed of 1 peta-FLOPS.
1 FLOPS is a speed measure for computers: an Floating Point Operation Per Second.
1 peta-FLOPS, this is a million of billions of FLOPS.

For comparison, this computer, on which you read this article, can execute about 100 millions FLOPS, i.e. 10 millions times less than Baker!

Baker will be 3 times quicker than Blue Gene, the most powerful according to Top500, the official list of the most quick supercomputers.

update, this wednesday 23/08/2006: one can read on this pagethat Japanese researchers have already broken the petaFLOPS barrier. But not officialy because it cannot run the software required by the official rankings. Nevertheless, it's a computer emerging from the biotechnology that has cost $9 million and which is already asked by pharmaceutical companies to test the thousands of chemical compounds that could become the next miracle drug, as well as the ways that each will interact with the trillions of proteins in the human body.

Source: FCW.com, last week.

For those who do not know:

• Cray Inc. is a supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. (CRI), was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray.

• Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research. He then took over the supercomputer market with his new designs, holding the top spot in supercomputing for 5 years (1985–1990).

• A multi-core microprocessor is one which combines two or more independent processors into a single package, often a single integrated circuit (IC). A dual-core device contains only two independent microprocessors.