There have been several interesting announcements n the world of supercomputing lately and there seems to be no limit to the need for ever-increasing amounts of computing power. Intel and SGI inked an agreement to work with the folks at NASA's Ames Research Center to begin development on a new supercomputer that will reach 10 petaflops (that's 10 trillion) when completed in 2012. The project, known as Pleiades, will start out at a mere 1 petaflop machine ready next year with a second machine being constructed at the 10 petaflop level. Meanwhile, researchers at UC Berkeley have proposed a 20 million CPU beast capable of reaching the 200 petaflop level. The estimated power consumption for this monster machine is estimated at 4 megawatts - enough to power a city of 100,000. That alone is somewhat ironic as the machine would be used to study climate change and to develop much more power cloud modeling. No estimates on the effects this computer and its power requirements would have on global warming were mentioned. Moving on, Purdue University decided to build its own supercomputer consisting of 812 Dell servers. Construction began Monday morning and was operational in time for lunch - the same day! At 60 trillion operation per second, Purdue's machine, nicknamed 'Steele', lands in the current top 40 of the world's list of supercomputers.