Year of the Petaflop

Some time next year, developers will fire up the first petascale supercomputer, capable of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or the computing muscle of more than 100,000 desktop computers.  A leading candidate to assume this title is the “Roadrunner” supercomputer being developed by IBM and the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.  Along with its supercomputer cousins, the Roadrunner will greatly improve scientists’ ability to conduct computer simulations on subjects like climate change, geology, new drug development, and nuclear weaponry.  The capabilities of supercomputers have already been put to great use. With the tremendous increase of computing power over the last decade, scientists have confirmed the human contribution to global climate change.  Petascale computers will only push this to the next level.  For instance, they will make it possible to predict the effects of an earthquake on every building in downtown Los Angeles; as it stands, current models can only make such predictions for areas 1-2 square miles in size.  Imagine the computation abilities of the exascale machine, expected by 2018 . . .

To read the full article in the Washington Post, click here.  Also, click here to view a video on the Roadrunner and the growing capacity of supercomputers.