Last October China’s Tianhe-1A took the title of the world’s most powerful supercomputer, capable of 2.5 petaflops, meaning it can perform 2.5 quadrillion operations per second. It may not hold the top spot for long, as IBM says that its 20- petaflop giant Sequoia will come online next year.
Looking ahead, engineers have set their sights even higher, on computers a thousand times as fast as Tianhe-1A that could model the global climate with unprecedented accuracy, simulate molecular interactions, and track terrorist activity. Such machines would operate in the realm called the exascale, performing a quintillion (that’s a 1 with 18 zeroes after it) calculations per second.
