GigaOM Pro

To build a bigger, better supercomputer, researchers are turning to lower-power processors, smarter software and other innovations.

The supercomputing industry strives to triple performance every 10 years, which means the industry needs to deliver an exaflop of performance (a billion billion calculations per second) by 2017. However, instead of doubling the number of transistors on a chip every 18 months, as Moore’s Law demands of semiconductor manufacturing firms hoping to increase performance in chips, building an exascale computer will require the industry to address challenges such as power consumption of the systems, basic software design and even the ways such systems are checked for failure and accuracy.