IBM Will Announce a Lab to Develop Supercomputers

NEW YORK — IBM will announce today that it has established a laboratory to develop supercomputers containing hundreds or even thousands of processor chips, machines that would challenge the fastest computers ever built.

The lab would mark IBM’s entry into a niche market that it had previously avoided. Supercomputers are used for highly complicated scientific calculations such as long-range weather forecasting.

International Business Machines Corp. plans to build these machines using the same processor chips found in its desktop workstations through a technique called parallel processing. Hundreds or thousands of these chips will be linked to work on a problem at once.

Similar machines already are on the market from such firms as Thinking Machines Corp. of Cambridge, Mass. It agreed last year to work with IBM to advance parallel processing technology.