Petascale computers: the next supercomputing wave Liz Tay | Nov
29, 2007 11:18 AM The author of the world's first published
collection on petascale techniques, David A. Bader, discusses
petascale, exascale and the future of computing. Supercomputing
has come a long way in the past half-century. Far from CDC's
single-operation scalar processors in the 1960s, present day
terascale computers in development by companies like Intel boast
up to 100 processor cores and the ability to perform one
trillion operations per second. Now, academics have turned their
attention to petascale computers that are said to be capable of
performing one quadrillion – that's one million billion –
operations per second. Running at nearly ten times the speed of
today's fastest supercomputers, petascale computing is expected
to open the doors to solving global challenges such as
environmental sustainability, disease prevention, and disaster
recovery. "Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications" was
launched this month as the world