The US government is planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several years to develop huge supercomputers with power beyond anything available today. The aim is to address the most challenging problems facing science, as well national security and industry.
Once completed, these systems will be capable of sustained petascale computing speeds, which are equal to quadrillions of calculations per second. To understand the scale of these planned systems, the leading machines on the current Top500 Supercomputer List are capable of reaching the range of only multiple TFLOPS (trillion floating-point operations per second). The latest Top500 list, updated twice a year, is due out tomorrow.
But PFLOPS (or "petaflop") systems are coming. Earlier this month, Seattle-based Cray Inc. said it had signed a contract worth US$200 million to deliver a PFLOPS-capable system to the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That system, based on Advanced Micro Devices processors, will be built in phases of ever-increasing speeds, and is due to be completed in 2008.
