The world's climate modellers are drawing up plans for a global supercomputing center with computing power of 100 petaflops that would provide detailed local forecasts of future climate change, with the intent of generating useful forecasts of water supply, droughts, health, and future food supply.
Japanese researchers have demonstrated laser communications chips capable of transfering information through optical fibers at a record 25 gigabits per second, a development that could lead to the first petaflop-class supercomputer by 2010.
A global race is under way to reach the next milestone in supercomputer performance, many times the speed of today's most powerful machines. And beyond the customary rivalry in the field between the United States and Japan, there is a new entrant - China - eager to showcase its arrival as an economic powerhouse.
Japan has revealed plans to build a supercomputer so staggeringly powerful that it will be five times swifter than the 500 fastest systems on the planet today – combined.
An experimental supercomputer made from hardware that can reconfigure itself to tackle different software problems is being built by researchers in Scotland. The supercomputer will be more powerful and efficient than a conventional system of similar physical size and f it can be made easy enough to program, it could usher in a new generation of compact and energy-saving supercomputers over the coming decade.
The ability to build powerful computers cheaply, combined with growing commercial demand for high-end computing power, is creating a renaissance in the field of supercomputing.
Researchers at the University of San Francisco are experimenting with what they are calling "flash mob supercomputing" by organizing hundreds of participants to gather and hook their personal computers together into a supercomputer.
As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the computing power of sophisticated but inexpensive video-game consoles, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a supercomputer from a mere 70 Sony PlayStation 2's.
A new Japanese supercomputer is capable of 35.6 trillion calculations per second, almost five times faster than the next best one and as fast as the top 5 U.S. supercomputers combined. U.S. analysts are concerned that the new supercomputer signals an end to American dominance of this high-profile field.
By 2010 supercomputers could be carrying out more than 1,000 trillion calculations per second. The ambitious goal has been set by the US Government to help its scientists tackle problems that would otherwise take too long to simulate.