Peta-files

A new crop of supercomputers is breaking down the petaflop speed barrier, "pushing high-performance computing into a new realm that could change science more profoundly than at any time since Galileo", say leading researchers who are also quick to point out that Galileo didn't even have computers, which is a big difference too.

When the unnecessarily long "Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers" was announced at the international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, IBM had barely managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, the first two computers to do so. Exciting, yes!

But so you can keep your awe in check, these computers aren't just faster than those they pushed further down the list, "they will enable a new class of science that wasn't possible before", say geeked out scientists. They will be able to run new and vastly more accurate models of complex phenomena: Climate models will have dramatically higher resolution and accuracy, new materials for efficient energy transmission will be developed and simulations of scramjet engines will reach a new level of complexity.

Truly, supercomputing has made huge advances over the last decade or so, gradually packing on the ability to handle more and more data points in increasingly complex ways. It has enabled scientists to test theories, design experiments and predict outcomes as never before. But now, the new class of petaflop-scale machines is poised to bring about major qualitative changes in the way science is done. Breaking the petaflop barrier, a feat that seemed "astronomical" just two years ago to those lacking forward thought, won't just allow faster computations. This new generation of petascale machines will move scientific simulation beyond just supporting the two main branches of science, theory and experimentation, and into the foreground. Instead of just hypotheses being tested with experiments and observations, large-scale extrapolation and prediction of things we can't observe or that would be impractical for an experiment, will become central to many scientific endeavors.

And as you also know, this will help Skynet eventually enslave the human race.