The National Science Foundation plans to award I.B.M. a contract to build the world’s fastest supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, according to documents that were accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week.
The new computer is to be the first supercomputer capable of one thousand trillion mathematical operations a second — a computing benchmark known as a petaflop.
The machine will cost $200 million to build and may cost more than $400 million during its five-year lifetime.