What Does the World's FASTEST Computer Do?

The world's fastest supercomputer will probably
never be known as the world's fastest supercomputer.

RIKEN's MDGrape-3 is the first machine to break
the petaflop barrier -- that's 1 quadrillion calculations (
floating-point operations, to be specific) per second --
and it's three times faster than the
currently ranked fastest computer in the world,
IBM's BlueGene/L.

But MDGrape-3 is so specialized that it can't run the
software used to officially rank computing speed.
What it can do is determine the effect of any chemical
compound on one of the most intricate systems in the
human body in a couple of seconds.

MDGrape-3 is designed for pharmaceutical research,
specifically molecular dynamics simulation.
In developing drugs, pharmaceutical companies have to
analyze thousands on thousands of chemical compounds
to find out how they'll affect the protein-bonding structures in the human body.

Protein structures called enzymes are the building blocks
that do all of the work within a cell, and the way these proteins
bond with any drug compound introduced into the human body
determines the body's response to that drug.

MDGrape-3 produces simulations of these molecular interactions.

Read the rest of this article at How Stuff Works