Understanding the complexity of Earth鈥檚 systems is becoming urgent as the needs of the 21st century unfold. One obvious consequence is the arrival of super-supercomputers, built by competing companies and funded by competing governments in a manner reminiscent of the arms and space races of cold war days.
So we will have to get used to the routine smashing of world records for size and speed. Less obviously, the nouns that belong to this infoworld will also come and go at dizzying speed.
What do these nouns looks like? Zettabyte is one example. It describes 1021 bytes (of course, it鈥檚 really a little bigger, but kilo and mega have long since been accepted as referring to 1024 and 10242 respectively, so鈥�) and belongs to a 鈥渇amily鈥� of names approved in 1990 and ranging up from zero to yottabyte (1024).
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Why single out zettabyte if it鈥檚 not the biggest? Because it鈥檚 the biggest 鈥渃hunk鈥� of data being routinely generated every four months by a real supercomputer, the Earth Simulator built by NEC from some 5000 linked processors and located in Yokohama, Japan. This computer is the fruit of a government project to produce high-resolution local and global models to predict the wilder weather expected as the world gets warmer. When it鈥檚 not busy at that ambitious task, it鈥檚 building a global, dynamic model of the solid Earth and looking at earthquakes.
So it has to run pretty fast. Earlier this year, the Earth Simulator notched up 35.9 trillion mathematical operations per second (teraflops). It won first place in the twice-yearly international Top 500 league table of fastest computers 鈥� and two weeks ago, it won again.
Winning the number 1 world ranking twice in one year has clearly upset its rivals. In the US, the ASCI-Q supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico ranks number 2, and some of its time is spent simulating nuclear explosions.
Enter Cray, the company once synonymous with supercomputers, with plans to snatch back the title for the US. Its X1 has a projected top speed of 52 teraflops, and doubtless an output of squillions of yottabytes. Eat your heart out, Earth Simulator.
Is that as fast as it gets for now? Not quite. Just days later, IBM unveiled its own plans. On paper at least, its Blue Gene/Lite supercomputer could reach a speed of 360 teraflops. This machine is part of a research programme to build a supercomputer that could crunch a petaflop per second.
What? Yes, a petaflop. That鈥檚 a staggering 1015 mathematical operations per second. This is likely to cause fresh naming problems. Already one Marx Brothers fan has suggested that the yotta鈥檚 big brother be called the harpi (1027), with grouchi at 1030. The other three Marx brothers are free for future expansion. Unless anyone has any better ideas?