There are several news articles floating around this weekend about the next generation supercomputers. It will be another 5 or 10 years, but there is some serious competition afoot by the U.S., Japan, China and even France to develop the next level of supercomputer. A petaflop, for those who need to know, is the ability to perform 1,000 trillion mathematical operations a second. Whew! I can't even think fast enough to comprehend that. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory can only do 136 trillion operations a second.
I think what I find more amazing is that the speed of future supercomputers appear to be limited not by the technology of the chips or the software, but by the cost of electricity to run the beast and to keep it cool. If this supercomputer is so fast and smart, why can't it design its own power and cooling systems?
