Stephen Meacham, IT research program director at the NSF, said the intent is to attack "frontier problems" in science, such as modeling the interaction of viruses with various components in a cell and looking for ways to block those interactions.

Although much of the focus on supercomputers is on the number of processors being strung together, more vexing problems involve their memory and storage subsystems, which "begin to take up a good chunk of the overall cost of the system," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM.

Energy consumption is another issue for systems that can consume power by the megawatt. Turek said the next-generation BlueGene system, BlueGene/P, will be targeted at delivering petaflop performance. But it will only require a 10 percent to 15 percent increase in power. IBM isn't disclosing other details, or a time frame, for this system.

Turek said that the most important goal is building low-cost, high-performance systems that a businesses can use. Indeed, there are efforts to encourage businesses to incorporate supercomputing systems as part of their IT infrastructure for use in product design.

To help further such use, legislation was introduced in the U.S. Senate this month to set aside $25 million to fund up to five supercomputing centers for assisting businesses and manufacturers. The bill is sponsored by Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) and Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.).