Now will this computer one day sit on my desktop?
Japan has revealed plans to build a supercomputer so staggeringly powerful that it will be five times swifter than the 500 fastest systems on the planet today – combined.
The supercomputer will boast a peak performance of 10 petaflops and should be completed in 2011, officials from Japan’s ministry for Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology announced on Monday. This means it will be able to perform 10 x 1015 mathematical calculations – better known as floating-point operations (or flops) – every second. A desktop computer, for perspective, has a maximum performance of roughly one billion flops per second.
10 * 1015 flops isn’t too impressive. My old C64 could manage that. Now, 10^1015 (^ = to the power of) *is* impressive.