PET_ard

[jya@pipeline.com (John Young)]

   Sci, 20 Sept 1996: 
 
   "Redefining the Supercomputer" 
 
      The word is petaflops, computer jargon for 1000 
      trillion computations per second. Think of it as a 
      year's labor for a powerful workstation compressed 
      into 30 seconds. Think of it, also, as 1000 times the 
      speed of the current computing benchmark, a trillion 
      operations a second --  teraflops -- which is on the 
      verge of becoming a reality at Sandia National 
      Laboratories after 5 years of effort. Now the federal 
      government's high-performance computing program is 
      aiming for a petaflops, and researchers are exploring 
      new technologies, sketching new architectures, and 
      pondering the software challenge of harnessing this 
      staggering computational power. 
 
      The NSA is a petaflops enthusiast, says a researcher, 
      but "we're not allowed to think about their 
      applications." 
 
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