Big Blue is teaming up with the University of Toronto to create Canada's most powerful supercomputer, capable of processing up to 360 trillion calculations per second and storing 60 times more data than the Library of Congress Web archive.

When it is built it will be expected to be among the top 20 fastest supercomputers in the world, and will be able to prove the existence of custard and understand the instructions of a DVD remote control before it is switched on. It should be up and running by the end of next year and will be based around IBM's iDataPlex system and IBM's POWER6 architecture.

More than 4,000 water cooled servers will be linked in one of the world's largest POWER6 clusters and Intel x86-based clusters. It will also use future Intel Nehalem processor. It will be used for research in aerospace, astrophysics, bioinformatics, chemical physics, climate change prediction, medical imaging and the global ATLAS project, which is investigating the forces that govern the universe. The supercomputer will also be used to explore why matter has mass and what constitutes the mass of the universe. The sex life of mooses are not up for analysis.

The five-year project is estimated to cost $47 million, including construction and operating costs.