Currently, the world's most powerful supercomputers can ramp up to more than a thousand trillion operations per second, or a petaflop. But computing power is not growing as fast as it has in the past. On Monday, the June 2015 listing of the Top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world revealed the beginnings of a plateau in performance growth.
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The development rate began tapering off around 2008. Between 2010 and 2013, aggregate increases ranged between 26 percent and 66 percent. And on this June's list, there was a mere 17 percent increase from last November.
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Despite the slowdown, many computational scientists expect performance to reach exascale, or more than a billion billion operations per second, by 2020.
Hmm, if they reach exascale computing will the weatherman finally be able to predict if it's going to rain this afternoon? Because he sucks at that now.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 20 2015, @08:28PM
You could elaborate just a little bit. "Bang for the buck" would fit better. There's enough money to do it quickly, IF the bigwigs felt the need to do so. But, it's not like mankind's survival depends on another petaflop computer. What we have is "good enough", and the decision makers are allowing some limited investment for tomorrow's needs. Ehhh.
Besides - until real quantum computers become a reality, there almost certainly is a limit to what can be done.
Hmmm - maybe it's time for a game of Singularity . . .
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 20 2015, @09:15PM
You are right. They are subject to the realities of chipmaking. 14nm, 10nm, and 7nm chips may boost performance and power efficiency, but they have to wait on the chipmakers. The chipmakers have to wait on ASML Holdings to finish extreme ultraviolet lithography.
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