Wolfram Alpha gets supercomputer boost

According to CNet.com, concerns with the public launch of Wolfram Alpha later this month is withstanding the crushing load the Internet can impose. But Wolfram Research revealed Tuesday it's building the service on the world's 66th-fastest supercomputer. The machine, built out of Dell hardware by a company called R Systems, can sustain performance of 39.6 trillion mathematical operations per second, according to the November 2008 list of the top 500 supercomputers. That muscle will come in handy for Alpha, which I think of as a combination of a graphing calculator, search engine, and reference library that not only supplies some answers to factual, data-intensive questions but also does math in the process.

What will this mean for public performance issues? Will it make a change in your work?