The stats geeks say that by some measures Big Ben is nearly 2¹/₂ times faster and performs up to 13 times better than Lemieux.

But this contest is about arithmetic, not athletics.

Big Ben is the name of the sophisticated new Cray XT3 computer that's now up and running at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Lemieux is a Hewlett Packard model that was once the second-fastest machine in the world.

The new computer will be unveiled this afternoon at a ceremony with officials from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, executives from Westinghouse Electric Co. and Cray Inc., and the National Science Foundation.

Big Ben was obtained with a $9.7 million NSF grant awarded last fall.

"It's the first one of a new generation of computers," said the center's scientific co-director Michael Levine. "What is unusual about this kind of machine is that it's meant to be used as a whole on [single] problems."

That means it can tackle highly complex simulations, allowing it to better forecast weather, examine the structure and function of proteins, study fluid flows and much more.

Many think that high-end computing "is all extremely esoteric stuff that doesn't affect most people," Levine said. "Some of the work is of that nature, but most of the work is actually very practical."

With a theoretical peak performance of 10 teraflops, or 10 trillion calculations per second, Big Ben is ranked the 33rd most powerful computer in the world, according to a top 500 list compiled by the University of Mannheim, the University of Tennessee and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.

"It's one of the fastest supercomputers currently available," said National Science Foundation director Arden Bement, who was born in Pittsburgh and raised in New Castle. These days, he added, "the demand for something even bigger and better is very, very high."

Big Ben's predecessor here, the 6-teraflop Lemieux, now ranks 68th. When it was installed four years ago, it was the world's second-fastest computer. It will still be in use for a while, Levine said.

"Lemieux is booked solid," he said. "Lemieux right now is in no danger of being shut down."

Currently the fastest computer is an IBM Blue Gene L system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which can do more than 135 trillion calculations per second. A planned expansion could theoretically crank it up to a mind-blowing 360 teraflops.

Big Ben is noteworthy because of the speed at which its 2,090 processors communicate with each other, known as inter-processor bandwidth. When half of its processors are used, it performs 13 times better than Lemieux, which is French for "the best."

Yet the new machine is physically smaller than its predecessor. Its 22 six-foot-tall cabinets would fit into a living room, while Lemieux's cabinets could fill a basketball court.

The center's computers are dressed in traditional black and gold, but Big Ben hasn't yet come up with a prediction for how the Steelers will fare in the upcoming season.

"Maybe somebody knows how to compute those things," Levine said, laughing. "I don't."