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the federal government is pushing computer scientists and engineers to greatly step up the speed and capacity of america's supercomputers.
officials say much faster performance is needed to handle a looming tidal wave of scientific, technical and military data.
powerful new telescopes, atom-smashers, climate satellites, gene analyzers and a host of other advanced instruments are churning out enormous volumes of computer bytes that will overwhelm even the swiftest existing machines.
in the next five years, the government's goal is a computer system that can process at least a quadrillion (a million times a billion) arithmetic operations per second. the best current machines operate in the trillions (a thousand times a billion) of calculations per second.
"within the next five to 10 years, computers 1,000 times faster than today's computers will become available. these advances herald a new era in scientific computing," according to raymond orbach, undersecretary for science at the department of energy.
a quadrillion-rated computer, known technically as a "petascale" system, will be at least four times faster than today's top supercomputer - ibm's bluegene/l - which holds the world's record at 280 trillion operations per second.
"peta" is the prefix for a quadrillion in the metric system. "tera" stands for a trillion, so bluegene is a terascale system.
on a more familiar level, a petascale computer will be at least 75 times faster than the most powerful game machine, such as ibm's xbox-360, and 100 times faster than a top-of-the-line desktop personal computer, such as the apple power mac.
on tuesday, riken, a japanese research agency, announced that it had built a computer system that theoretically can perform 1 quadrillion operations per second. if so, this would be the world's first true petascale computer.
the energy department also needs petascale computing to help solve problems that are blocking the development of nuclear fusion, an unlimited, nonpolluting energy source that's baffled designers for decades.
the doe and nasa, the space agency, are collaborating in an effort to determine the nature of the dark energy and dark matter that are thought to make up 95 percent of the universe. petascale computer power will be needed here, too.
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