Communications of the ACM
The First Exascale Computer
If exascale computing is the equivalent of an automobile reaching 1,000 miles per hour, todays fastest systems are running within a range of 10 and 33 miles per hour.
Credit: WT VOX
Exascale computing refers to supercomputers capable of at least one exaFLOPS (a billion billion calculations) per second. Such capacity represents a thousandfold increase over the first petascale computer that came into operation in 2008. (One exaflops is a thousand petaflops or a quintillion, 1018, floating point operations per second.)
Exascale computing is considered as potentially the most significant achievement in computer engineering, for it is believed to be the order of processing power of the human brain at neural level (functional might be lower). It is for instance, the target power of the Human Brain Project.
Currently the fastest systems in the world perform between 10 and 33 petaflops, or ten to 33 million billion calculations per second – roughly one to three percent the speed of exascale. Put into context, if exascale computing is the equivalent of an automobile reaching 1000 miles per hour, today's fastest systems are running within a range between ten and 33 miles per hour.
From WT VOX
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