International Business Machines Corp., the biggest commercial maker of supercomputers, is set to build the world's fastest computer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The National Science Foundation will award $208 million to fund construction of the machine over 4 1/2 years, the foundation said Wednesday in a statement. The computer, called Blue Waters, is the fastest to be announced, said Thomas Dunning, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.

Blue Waters will be the first computer capable of performing a thousand trillion calculations per second, or a petaflop, on a sustained basis. It will become operational in 2011, the statement said.

"The real significance is the technologies that will be developed and included in this machine," Dunning said in an interview. "The technologies will find applications that will go far beyond the types of work we're doing here."

Supercomputers break down complex tasks, such as mapping seismic activity or designing materials, into small calculations that are processed simultaneously. The university will operate Blue Waters with the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation.

IBM, the world's biggest computer-services company, has built almost half of the 500 fastest supercomputers. The Armonk, N.Y.-based company said in June it had assembled the Blue Gene/P, which can operate at petaflop speeds.