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Supercomputer to boost research The door to the petascale era is being opened at ANU with the signing of an agreement with Fujitsu to build and install the most powerful supercomputer in Australia and among the largest in the world. The new 1. Petaflop supercomputer, to be installed at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at ANU, will be capable of performing 170,000 calculations per second for each of the seven billion people on the planet. NCI Director Professor Lindsay Botten said the computer will be a valuable asset to a host of research areas. "This state-of-the-art facility will support Australia through an internationally competitive capability that raises the nation's position in high-impact research and innovation. "Research in climate modelling, advanced materials, astronomy and medicine is critically dependent on high-performance computational modelling and data analysis. "Researchers in these areas are among the outstanding teams poised to benefit from the new facility  as soon as it is available later this year," he said.