
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.
The biggest hurdle to super-supercomputing is energy. Today’s supercomputers consume more than 5 megawatts of power. Exascale computers built on the same principles would devour 100 to 500 megawatts—about the same as a small city. At current prices, the electric bill alone for just one machine could top $500 million per year, says Richard Murphy, computer architect at Sandia National Laboratories.
To avoid that undesirable future, Murphy is leading one of four teams developing energy-efficient supercomputers for the Ubiquitous High-Performance Computing program organized by the military’s experimental research division, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. Ultimately the agency hopes to bring serious computing power out of giant facilities and into field operations, perhaps tucked into fighter jets or even in Special Forces soldiers’ backpacks...
Image: Built-in cooling pipes will keep IMB's new Blue Waters super-computer running smoothly. Courtesy of NCSA