THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO and IBM are building Canada's most powerful supercomputer, a colossally greedy machine that will have its very own building for storage and will be capable of performing 360 trillion calculations per second.

The gargantuan machine is estimated to be among the top 20 fastest supercomputers in the world. The data storage will be equivalent to one million DVDs.

The budget will be as mammoth as the machine, costing a huge $47 million over five years, funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, in partnership with the province of Ontario and the university.

Chris Pratt, strategic initiatives executive at IBM Canada explains that, " The kind of interconnect between parts of the system will allow the equivalent of two full-length feature DVD movies to be moved around in the space of a second."

The monster machine will help tackle projects in a wide array of areas from aerospace and astrophysics to climate change prediction and medical imaging, a big boost for the University of Toronto and its associated research hospitals

Among the research, the system will be used to explore the modern scientific mystery of why matter has mass and what constitutes the mass of the universe.

The build will include implementation of IBM's iDataPlex system, and is entirely water-cooled.

"Every aspect of the system has been put together to be the most powerful and yet the most energy-efficient," Pratt said.

The installation process will begin autumn next year, and Pratt reckons it should be ready by the time he's due to expose his knees to the Canadian summer.