Petascale computing

In computing, petascale refers to a computer system capable of reaching performance in excess of one petaflops, i.e. one quadrillion floating point operations per second. The standard benchmark tool is LINPACK and Top500.org is the organization which tracks the fastest supercomputers. Some uniquely specialized petascale computers do not rank on the Top500 list since they cannot run LINPACK. This makes comparisons to ordinary supercomputers hard.

Petascale can also refer to very large storage systems where the capacity exceeds one petabyte (PB).

Petascale computing is being used to do advanced computations in fields such as weather and climate simulation, nuclear simulations, cosmology, quantum chemistry, lower-level organism brain simulation, and fusion science.

The National Science Foundation is responsible for initiating and funding several petascale computers in the United States, as well as DARPA who gave IBM the contract to develop the petascale PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computer System) platform.

China has developed four petascale computers, Nebulae, Tianhe-I, Tianhe-2, and the Sunway TaihuLight.

Russia has developed the Lomonosov () petascale computer.

Other countries, such as Germany and Japan, have plans of their own for petascale computers.

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