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CHAMPAIGN, ILL. (AP) -- By 2011, the University of Illinois should be the home of the world's fastest supercomputer.

The National Science Board on Thursday gave the National Science Foundation the OK to spend $208 million to build the computer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana, Ill.

The board oversees the foundation.

Foundation spokeswoman Leslie Fink says it still must negotiate the details with the center, but it would be very unusual for the foundation not to follow the board's recommendation.

Illinois calls the new supercomputer Blue Waters, and it will be capable of performing a thousand trillion mathematical operations a second. That standard for computational speed is known as a petaflop, and computer scientists have dreamt of reaching it for years.

IBM's Blue Gene/L, currently the world's fastest supercomputer, has only about a third of Blue Waters' expected capability.

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