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For years, Western governments have used supercomputers to model weapons of nuclear war.
Now a company in China uses the powerful machines to tend the fantasy realms of World of Warcraft.
Supercomputers, which are up to a million times faster than the typical desktop PC, are still staples in the data warehouses of national laboratories and universities in the United States, Japan and Western Europe. But over the last few years, the falling cost of supercomputer systems has allowed a broader range of corporations and institutions, including many in China and India, to buy them for everything from processing movie graphics to searching for oil.
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– Computing From Weather to Warcraft
The Smarter Planet tumblelog is an outgrowth of IBM’s strategic initiative to help a world of smart systems emerge.
See this primer on Smarter Planet
