IBM has a partnership with the US Department of Energy to build a 20 petaflops machine by 2011-2012*, followed by an exaflop machine (10^18 flops), the processing equivalent of about a billion PCs.

IBM is also planning to develop over the next 10 years a machine capable of processing the exabyte (10^18) of data expected to flow per day from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope project. And the company is developing advanced algorithms in areas such as correlation, which facilitate the integration of high volumes of data from multiple telescopes to create more detailed astronomical images.

*Ray Kurzweil estimated in The Singularity Is Near that the human brain calculates at 10^16 operations per second and that the capacity to emulate the brain would be available in a supercomputer in 2013.