Road runner on the test track: 1.026E15 FLOPs

Yeah baby! The worlds fastest supercomputer is an accelerated (Cell based) system. For those who can’t parse the number, 1.026E15 is 1.026 x 10^15, or 1.026 x 1 (followed by 15 zeros). 1 Million is 1E6 or Mega, 1 Billion is 1E9 or Giga (though I understand the UK and a few others use a different phrase … thousand millions), 1 Trillion is 1E12 or Tera, and 1 Quadrillion is 1E15 or Peta.

Now how quickly will we hit an Exaflop (1E18)? And more importantly, how efficiently will we be able to use it? Its only 3 orders of magnitude more than the current unit. At 5.5 years per OOM in per-core performance, it could be 15 years to hit that based upon Moore’s law. But performance has been growing faster than that due to the multiplicative effect of clustering. A super-Moore’s law appears to be in effect.