Petaflops? DARPA Seeks Quintillion-Flop Computers

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday June 23, 2010 @05:43AM from the that's-a-lotta-flops dept.

coondoggie writes "Not known for taking the demure route, researchers at DARPA this week announced a program aimed at building computers that exceed current peta-scale computers to achieve the mind-altering speed of one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. Dubbed extreme scale computing, such machines are needed, DARPA says, to 'meet the relentlessly increasing demands for greater performance, higher energy efficiency, ease of programmability, system dependability, and security.'"

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Re:how sweet and innocent of them! by Entropius · 2010-06-23 05:49 · Score: 4, Interesting

Good luck. I can encrypt something in polynomial time (quadratic, isn't it?) that it takes you exponential time to encrypt.
Re:Exaflops by amchugh · 2010-06-23 07:58 · Score: 3, Interesting

Quintillion is a different quantity in long scale countries (10^30) vs short-scale countries (10^18), which is partly why the SI units were standardized.