The Electronic Telegraph 25 April 1995 HOME NEWS
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Super-fast computers 'will take us out of the dark ages'

By Adrian Berry, Science Correspondent

THE next generation of supercomputers will calculate 10,000 times faster than present ones, and 200 million times faster than today's home computers. "They will be able to explore the world and the universe in ways we can barely imagine," said Dr Thomas Sterling, of Nasa's Centre for Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences at Greenbelt, Maryland. "We will no longer be in the dark age of knowledge."

Expected to be available within 10 to 20 years, these machines will be able to do 1,000 trillion calculations per second compared with the present limit of about 50 billion. They are being called "peta-crunchers", after the word peta which means 10 followed by 15 noughts.

"They will make it possible to watch a film on television with an infinite number of different endings which the viewer can choose." This would be done by manipulating cartoon characters that would look identical to real actors.

Peta-crunchers would be able to find the best possible design for new drugs at lightning speed. "We shall also be able to study the evolution of a star from birth to death. Today, we can predict only the details of its ageing by theory," said Dr Sterling.

They would use a mixture of many exotic technologies. One of these would be superconductors, in which millions of transistors would be packed together so closely that the machine would need to be cooled by liquid nitrogen to get rid of the excess heat. If this was not done, the computer would melt.

Dr Sterling, who has designed a mock-up peta-cruncher which he calls Beowulf after the monster-slaying hero, said the technology of the completed machine would make it possible to build very cheaply versions of today's supercomputers that now cost millions.

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