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Science 20 September 1996:
Vol. 273. no. 5282, pp. 1655 - 1657
DOI: 10.1126/science.273.5282.1655
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Research News

Gary Taubes

The government's high-performance computing program has an audacious new goal: building a computer more than 1000 times faster than today's fastest machine within 10 years. At a thousand trillion computations per second--a measure of speed known as a petaflops--such a machine could squeeze a year's work for a powerful workstation into 30 seconds. As a first step, researchers are now studying designs for processors that could carry out operations in perhaps 10 trillionths of a second and architectures that could reduce latency--the "down time" when a processor waits for data.




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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)