The US Air Force now has, at the Maui High Performance Computing Center, the 57th most powerful computer in the world. The US government bought an IBM SP supercomputer to help differentiate space debris, both natural and man-made, from possible missile threats. The computer achieves peak processing capability of 480 billion calculations per second using 320 IBM POWER3-II microprocessors, 224 gigabytes of memory and 2.9 teraBytes of IBM storage. The computer uses image-enhancing algorithms to eliminate motion blur and compensate for atmospheric distortion and other optical effects, in 3 to 5 seconds.

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