Exascale computing

Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of at least one exaFLOPS, or 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.) At a supercomputing conference in 2009, Computerworld projected exascale implementation by 2018.

Exascale computing would be considered as a 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.

China currently has the fastest two supercomputers in the world. China's first exascale supercomputer will enter service by 2020 according to the head of the school of computing at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT). According to the national plan for the next generation of high performance computers, China will develop an exascale computer during the 13th Five-Year-Plan period (2016-2020). The government of Tianjin Binhai New Area, NUDT and the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin are working on the project. The exascale supercomputer is planned to be named Tianhe-3.

In 2008 the United States of America governmental organisations the Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration, provided funding to the Institute for Advanced Architectures for the development of an exascale supercomputer ; Sandia National Laboratory and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory were also to collaborate on exascale designs. The technology was expected to be applied in various computation-intensive research areas, including basic research, engineering, earth science, biology, materials science, energy issues, and national security.

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