NASA Ames, Intel and SGI will work together on a project called Pleiades to develop a system with a capacity of one Petaflops peak performance by 2009 and a system with a peak performance of 10 Petaflops by 2012.

And the 200,000 processor core system known as Blue Waters got the green light recently as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) said it has finalized the contract with IBM to build the world’s first sustained petascale computational system, delivering sustained performance of more than one petaflop on many real-world scientific and engineering applications.

The system may be used to study complex processes like the interaction of the Sun’s coronal mass ejections with the Earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere; the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe; understanding the chains of reactions that occur with living cells; and the design of novel materials.