Sci, 20 Sept 1996: "Redefining the Supercomputer" The word is petaflops, computer jargon for 1000 trillion computations per second. Think of it as a year's labor for a powerful workstation compressed into 30 seconds. Think of it, also, as 1000 times the speed of the current computing benchmark, a trillion operations a second -- teraflops -- which is on the verge of becoming a reality at Sandia National Laboratories after 5 years of effort. Now the federal government's high-performance computing program is aiming for a petaflops, and researchers are exploring new technologies, sketching new architectures, and pondering the software challenge of harnessing this staggering computational power. The NSA is a petaflops enthusiast, says a researcher, but "we're not allowed to think about their applications." ----- http://jya.com/petard.txt (20 kb) PET_ard