Supercomputers crunching potato chips, proteins and nuclear bombs

The chess match between Garry Kasparov and IBM's Deep Blue in 1997 was the showdown of man vs. machine: the world's greatest chess player versus the world's greatest chess-playing computer.

Deep Blue, a supercomputer that could calculate more than 200 million moves a second, defeated Kasparov 2 games to 1, with three games ending in a draw.

Deep Blue's match win was the first by a chess-playing computer in a traditional format over a reigning world champion.

Fast-forward nine years and supercomputers -- systems with multiple processors, huge memories and storage, and special software for performing the world's most complex calculations -- are doing far more than checkmating grandmasters.