Quickly computing quarks.

When IBM Corp. doesn't talk, everyone pays attention -- nervously. So far, IBM has been conspicuously absent from the supercomputer market, now dominated by Cray Research, Inc., and Control Data Corp., both based in Minneapolis. However, news of at least one IBM research effort in high-speed computing surfaced at last month's National Computer Conference in Chicago. A team of physicists will soon take over a specially built computer designed to solve a single physics problem. According to an IBM official, this computer is supposed to take less than a year to solve a problem that would take a Cray-1 supercomputer more than 300 years to do.

The IBM machine, developed at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., consists of an array of 576 processors, each one capable of 20 million "floating point" operations per second (equivalent to multiplying two decimal numbers 20 million times). In contrast, a typical personal computer performs 1,000 or so such operations per second. When all the processors are working in parallel, each one handling a small part of a computation, the IBM computer can handle more than 10 billion floating point operations per second.

The machine will be used to calculate the mass of a proton from "first principles," applying quantum chromodynamics theory. This year-long exercise should give physicists some clues as to the validity of their concepts about quarks and gluons. Once this project is over, the machine could be used for other purposes, says IBM's George Paul. And the computer's design team is already thinking about how to extend the ideas they developed for the original machine.