IBM planning to build fastest computer — Report

The machine will use up so much electricity and throw off so much heat that engineers have bought a gas turbine the size of a jet engine to cool it. Since proteins are the molecular work horses of the human body, scientists would like to know the basic chemical rules for every one of about 40,000 of them.

But it won’t be easy. The Blue Gene, 40 times faster than the combined speed of the 40 fastest super computers in the world today, will run for an entire year to produce an answer for one protein.

"This is the biology of the 21st century," said the Post. "The project is underway at the International Business Machines Corp is one notable effort to tackle a new problem, one so daunting it is already causing wrenching changes in science and industry."

Sometime later this year, scientists expect to post a virtually complete human genetic sequence in the world’s computer banks, the newspaper reported. However, the completion of the human genome project will only be the beginning of a new race to unravel all the information encoded in genes. The real goal, likely to take decades to accomplish, is to understand in their entirety the ingredients and the chemical interactions that make up a human being.

J Craig venter, one of the scientists involved in the race to publish the sequence, said: "I am certain that a century from now, scientists will still be making major, insightful discoveries on the genetic sequence that is going to get determined this year. It is a mind-boggling amount of information."

Genes are scattered in bits and pieces along the 3.1 billion letters of genetic code that make up the genome. The genes are basically instruction sets for making proteins, and those proteins do nearly all the work associated with keeping a person alive. The kind of work that proteins do is determined by their three-dimensional shape, which is itself a function of their precise chemical makeup.