Congress passed a bill Wednesday for $165 million in new supercomputing funding in the United States, a move that came a week after a report criticized current supercomputing as insufficient for the country's security needs. . . .
Congress passed a bill Wednesday for $165 million in new supercomputing funding in the United States, a move that came a week after a report criticized current supercomputing as insufficient for the country's security needs.

The bill, called the Department of Energy High-End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004, now needs the signature of President Bush to become law. The president is expected to sign the bill, a representative of the House Science Committee said.

Supercomputers are powerful machines used for tasks such as predicting hurricane paths and other weather issues, assuring nuclear weapons will work despite aging, investigating human biochemistry, cracking encoded communications, and projecting the consequences of global warming. For more than two years, the fastest supercomputer by one measurement was a Japanese system, NEC's Earth Simulator.

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