The performance advances of supercomputers in these past decades have been remarkable. The machines I used as a student in the 1960s probably had a peak performance of a few million calculations per second or megaflops. Gigaflops (billions) peak speeds were achieved in 1985, teraflops (trillions) in 1997, and petaflops (a 1 followed by fifteen zeros) in 2008. The supercomputing community is now aiming for exascale computing, – 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second.
Challenges to Exascale Computing
April 8, 2010