Peter Sayer

IBM Corp. signed a deal Wednesday to build a supercomputer capable of 40 trillion floating-point operations per second (40T flops) in Spain, where it will form the heart of a new National Center for Supercomputing. The general purpose computer will be used to conduct research into genetic abnormalities, contagious diseases, climate change and materials science.

The French government forgave the would-be operators of the country's two third generation (3G) mobile communications networks for the long delays in offering commercial 3G services Tuesday.

The German government will officially launch D-Grid, an initiative to promote a grid-based communication framework for scientific research in Germany, at the Global Grid Forum in Berlin on Wednesday.

MSN Messenger and Hotmail users will soon have access to a slicker mobile version of those services, as new mobile phones incorporating clients for the two messaging services appear on the market, but other messaging services are not yet supported.

The French government will install open source software on the desktop as part of Project ADELE, a plan to computerize much of the country's administration by 2007, a government official said Wednesday.

The French government has unveiled a four-year plan to put more national and local government services online.

The French government has unveiled a four-year plan to put more national and local government services online.

South Korea's claims that the U.S. and the European Union (E.U.) imposed unfair trade barriers to sales of Korean memory chips are to be examined by the World Trade Organization (WTO).