Rice University is doubling the number of supercomputing hours it can offer its researchers with the addition of a new IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer, which will become operational in May.

Rice and IBM are sharing the cost of the system, and Rice will be sharing its administration and use with the University of Sao Paulo (USP) in Brazil. The as-yet-unnamed supercomputer, developed in part at IBM's labs in Austin, TX and the first to be built in that state, is a six-rack system containing nearly 25,000 processor cores. It's capable of conducting around 85 trillion mathematical computations...