World Business Quick Take

■ Computers
Supercomputer planned
Intel Corp, the world's biggest maker of computer chips, has been picked by the US' Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to supply chips for what may be the most powerful computer made from standard parts, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a league table of the world's biggest computer installations. The machine, called Thunder, will probably use 3,840 of Intel's Itanium 2 microprocessors and rank No. 2 in performance among the world's supercomputers, the newspaper said. The table, compiled by researchers at Germany's Mannheim University, Tennessee University and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in California, was released at a technical conference in Arizona, the Journal said.

■ Real estate
China probes scandal
An into land use in China revealed the cases of illegal land use this year has doubled to 168,000 cases from a year ago, state-run Xinhua news agency reported. Among the biggest are five cases in the municipality of Tianjin and the provinces of Jiangxi, Shandong and Shanxi, the report said, citing Zhang Xinbao, director of law enforcement and supervision at the Ministry of Land and Resources. Last month, Minister of Land and Resources Tian Fengshan was fired amid a probe into corruption scandals. China, which has begun limiting building approvals and land supply, told banks in June to restrict property lending. Real-estate investment surged by a third in the first eight months of the year to 557 billion yuan (US$67.3 billion).