… The graphs provided in the article make wrapping one’s brain around the numbers a bit more possible … a most intriguing article …
World’s fastest computer: 10 quadrillion calculations per second
by Terrence Aym … Created on: February 19, 2012 … http://www.helium.com/items/2294123-worlds-fastest-computer-does-10-quadrillion-calculations-per-second
Japanese cybernetic experts have announced a truly incredible achievement: a supercomputer that can calculate at the rate of 10,000,000,000,000,000 per second.
While many people have a hard time wrapping their brain around the current U.S. deficit that’s approaching 16 trillion as of this writing, a quadrillion is 1,000 trillion, or one million billion, or one billion million.
For a visual idea of how much a quadrillion is take a peek at this graphic depicting one quadrillion pennies.
If all this is a little confusing, don’t worry too much. Everyone can agree that 10 quadrillion is a very large number.
Yet there are far bigger numbers that exist. For instance, in 2010 Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum claimed that the estimated total number of stars in the entire universe is 300 sextillion (300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). That number is so large that it would take the Japanese computer 347.22 days to reach it even at 10 quadrillion calculations per second.
According to Japan Times, information technology giant Fujitsu’s super-supercomputer called the “K computer,” reached the lofty 10 quadrillion number and attained the number one position in the world in a ranking of the top 500 supercomputers.
The supercomputer superstar is proudly maintained at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan.
Future computers may not be based on silicon While the remarkable K computer still has a silicon brain, engineers see the limits of supercomputers being reached in the near future—at least those computers using silicon chips.
Although some experts are predicting silicon chip computers that will operate 100 times faster than AICS’s K by 2018, the current technology will be limited by power consumption.
A break from silicon into the next generation of molecular-quantum computers will enable the geometric progression of computational power to continue soaring. Quantum computer (Q-computers) futurists predict that advanced Q-computers will run circles around supercomputers like K by processing information at a rate more than a million times faster than 10 quadrillions.
Intense research is underway to create Q-computers that operate using synthetic molecules as binary switches. Theoretically quantum computing is a natural as both machine language and the underlying structure of existence (the quanta) are binary.
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