It's 1,000 times more powerful than the Deep Blue machine that whipped world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, but IBM's new Blue Gene supercomputer is not designed to play games.

The $100 million development project has much loftier goals - nothing less than helping improve the human condition by decoding the nature of how diseases work.

Designed to be capable of performing more than one quadrillion operations per second, Blue Gene will be used to study how proteins fold, considered important to understanding diseases and finding cures.

The ambitious new RS/6000 computer will contain more than one million processors, each capable of one billion operations per second.

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