Legislation approved by the U.S. Senate would create a government research and development program to boost supercomputing technology. The bill approved by the Senate yesterday will establish an R&D program within the Energy Department to revitalize U.S. high-performance computing capabilties. Senate backers said they expect the House of Representatives to approve similar legislation during a post-election session in November. The Senate bill also authorizes the Energy Department to create supercomputer centers that would be made available to researchers on a competitive basis. IBM Corp. claimed last month that its Blue Gene/L supercomputer outperformed NEC Corp.'s 35-teraflop Earth Simulator supercomputer in recent internal tests.