Future

What does the future look like for supercomputers? According to Moore’s law about the speed of technical advancement humanity should be seeing a supercomputer that is able to perform at 1 Exaflop by 2018. The future looks rich but we might not be able to afford it, as far as funds go, it doesn’t look attainable according to the United States Department of Energy. The issue would be that the amount of power required to start and continuously operations of the supercomputer. An Exaflop is calculated, based off of today’s technologies, to be around 200MW of power, which is about the power needed to power 66,000 homes every hour or roughly $30,000 an hour. Calculations have also been made that show the power required can be reduced to only 20MW if technology continues to advance. The mission to break the barrier has been given the name Exaflop Barrier Race. The power of an Exaflop will be extremely useful to the science, engineering, business and technological world in more ways than one.

Today’s challenges don’t have to be far and few when it comes to solving them. Exflops will offer the power needed to calculate much higher accuracy for modeling, formation of hurricanes, molecular level genetic workings, how the brains synapses operate and many more very important challenges. The challenge with operating at such high speeds is the amount of heat being generated by the hardware so the amount of extreme heat calculated will not allow the supercomputer to survive before reaching an Exaflop. Its benefits also reaches out to the universe, it’s how power can help study plasma, gas, liquids and solids in order to find answers that will help understand how the universe works, which will give us the hand when attempting to understanding information below the atomic level. Pharmacies will be able to enter in experimental medicine testing to reduce side effects, cure more diseases and even cancer. Weather calculations will be much more accurate and further in to the future. Data mining is now a very popular part of the internet, with the power we need we are able to find rare hidden patterns in vast amounts of data on a much larger scale, faster calculations and increased accuracy. Data mine discoveries will change the future because it offers an insight on the hidden world of patterns that all fields of study crave. The future is on its way and preparing for it will increase the betterment of humanity on a multiple levels.