Each year, a more powerful computer comes on the scene, giving us an indication of the kind of technology that may eventually trickle down to desktops across the world.

Last year it was IBM?s BlueGene/L supercomputer, which surpassed NEC?s Earth Simulator in Japan to become the world?s most powerful number cruncher.

Prior to that the title was held by Virginia Tech?s Rebuilt System X, then Sandia?s Red Storm.

All this of course is what we know publicly. I am sure, somewhere, some military man (or woman), grins at each new claim, while patting his faster machine and saying: ?I?m the biggest and baddest of the lot.?

Today, the title is claimed by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centre (www.psc.edu ), which says its Cray XT3 marks the newest stage in the evolution of high-performance computing technology.

Big Ben, as it is nicknamed, is made up of 2,090 processors with an overall peak performance of 10 teraflops: 10 trillion calculations per second.

Big Ben took four years to build and will be part of the US? TeraGrid. This is the world?s largest private ?Internet?, or cyberinfrastructure, for open scientific research.

The TeraGrid is currently being used for research in biology, physics, chemistry, engineering and astronomy.

Why is Big Ben of interest for us lesser mortals? It is a concept called ?inter-processor bandwidth? the speed at which processors share information with each other.

Big Ben is able to share information much faster, allowing researchers to design much better models of nanotechnology (very small machines) applications, design new materials, study earthquake soil-vibration and forecast weather.

Big Ben houses its 2,090 processors (AMD Opteron, 2.4 GHz for those who want to know) in 22 cabinets.

The Cray SeaStar interconnect sustains 6.5 gigabytes per second bidirectional communication between the processors.

That?s the equivalent of downloading about 1,000 movies a second. This is the kind of technology that?s going to drive a faster Internet, and eventually appear on a computers, in a lesser form of course.

Try comparing that with your Internet connection in Bermuda! But really, I think the IT people behind the walls of processors are just playing computer games on the souped up machine.

A point which allows me to alert you to a study by America Online and Salary.com, which shows that connected employees, on average, waste about 2.09 hours per day.

Here it is, the top five list for time wasting by industry:

1 Insurance 2.5 hrs;

2 Public Sector (Non-Education) 2.4 hrs;

3 Research & Development 2.3 hrs;

4 Education 2.2 hrs;

5 Software & Internet 2.2 hrs.

The figures are from an online poll of users of AOL and Salary.com, who asked respondents to indicate how much time they wasted per day in a five eight-hour-day workweek.

Salary.com calculated that employers spend $759 billion per year on salaries for which real work was expected, but not actually performed.

Personal Internet use was found to be the biggest distraction, with 44.7 per cent of employees citing the Internet as the biggest draw. Socialising with co-workers was next, at 23.4 per cent.

Personal business, daydreaming, errands and personal phone calls made up the rest. However employees say they?re not always to blame for this wasted time. About 33.2 per cent of the 10,044 respondents cited a lack of work as their biggest reason for wasting time.

Another 23.4 per cent said they wasted time at work because they feel they are underpaid.

Go to www.salary.com and check out their online salary calculator to see whether you really are. The figures for each job category are for the US so you?ll have to figure out the Bermuda bonus to feel deprived.

According to a Salary.com follow-up survey of Human Resource managers, companies assume that employees will waste 0.94 hours per day.

They take this into account when they do their compensation planning. The survey shows managers privately suspect that employees waste 1.6 hours per day.

In fact, employees admit to wasting 2.09 hours per day. Call it letting off pressure, or the social cost of keeping a company happy, I say.

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