[AccessD] And why not?

The move to exaflop supercomputers
Today, the world's fastest supercomputers are topping out at about 1 petaflop--or 1,000 trillion 
floating point operations per second. Biswas said there are about five such computers on Earth 
today, two at the LINK Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, one in China, and one in Germany. And 
Pleiades is just behind that. But already, he said, the next-generation thinking in the industry is 
envisioning machines capable of exaflop computing, which is the equivalent of 1,000 petaflops.

Of course, as with any new supercomputing threshold, the question isn't necessarily whether it's 
possible to build the hardware, but whether it's also possible to optimize applications for such a 
powerful system. And not only that, Biswas said, but there's also a crucial question of whether it's 
possible to build machines that powerful and yet have them be energy efficient.

A petaflop supercomputer draws about 7 megawatts of power, he explained. That would mean that 
without increased efficiencies, an exaflop machine would draw 7 gigawatts. And that's simply out of 
the question. "You can't expect to have a nuclear reactor sitting next to a supercomputer," he said.

;)

-- 
John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com