Europe's fastest supercomputer has been switched on in Germany. Jugene has the power of 50,000 home PCs and is the fastest in Europe and the third worldwide. It is capable of 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second, ranks behind the "Roadrunner" and "Jaguar" computers in the United States.

Boffins plan to use the Jugene for a wide variety of operations, including research on fuel cells for electric cars, weather forecasting and the origins of the universe. It is no portable machine either. It is made up of 295,000 processors located in 72 lockers each the size of a telephone box.

The beast is based around IBM's Blue Gene technology. Each 2 Racks has 32 nodecards x 32 compute nodes. It uses 4-way SMP 32-bit PowerPC 450 core 850 MHz processors which push the performance one Petaflops.

The main memory is two Gbytes per node which adds up to 144 TB and the whole lot is connected by a 10 Gigabit ethernet connection. It all runs on SUSE Linux.