ChessBease.com has a wealth of information on what could be the “highest level of computer chess ever played”.

It’s an eight-game match between multiple world champion Shredder, running on a superfast four-processor system, and Hydra, a Deep Blue style hardware program running on a 16-way Linux cluster. The match is being held in Abu Dhabi (or Abu Zaby), 120km from Dubai, where the FIDE president wants to build a 64,000 square meter International Chess City, which will feature 32 buildings designed to mirror the image of a traditional black and white game board. ” Hydra is a hardware program, based on FPGA technology. It was developed by the Austrian mathematician Dr Christian (”Chrilly”) Donninger, who worked with leading experts in the field to produce the Brutus program. In the match in Abu Dhabi a multi-processor version of Brutus, called Hydra, will be running on a 16-way Linux cluster, in which each node is a 3.06 Xeon processor. The host system holds 16 FPGA Virtex I cards. The cluster resides in the server room of Pal Group of companies in Abu Dhabi.” The contest started on the 14th, and if you’re dying to know how it’s going, you can follow the action on PlayChess.com. May the best machine win.