A Supercomputer For Africa

Nigerian schoolchildren no doubt appreciate the innovative little machines that are trickling into Africa via Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child program. But IBM thinks the developing world needs a little more processing power to cross the digital divide–about 14,000 times more, by the company’s estimation.

The computer giant announced Tuesday it will donate one of its BlueGene/P supercomputers to the Center for High Performance Computing in Cape Town, South Africa. The computer will be hosted by the Meraka Institute, which will lend it to universities and governments in need of its massive processing abilities. The machine, which is capable of performing 14 trillion individual calculations per second, is five times more powerful than the fastest computer currently on the continent.

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