Illinois Scientists Open Supercomputer Center

URBANA, Ill. — Scientists will use one of the world’s fastest computers to study everything from tornadoes to traffic at a new supercomputer center opened here last week. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, uses an $11-million Cray X-MP computer, which contains 393,000 computer chips and can operate about 10,000 times faster than an ordinary personal computer.