NASA by 2009 aims to be running a petaflop supercomputer that will be able to do 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
By 2012 it hopes to have boosted the power of this machine to 10 petaflops, to help with modeling and simulation.
If it manages the feat, it will be one of only a few organizations that can tap such vast number-crunching power.
The supercomputer will be installed at Nasa's Ames Research Center at Moffet Field, California. Nasa's current top supercomputer, called Columbia, was turned on in 2004 and has a theoretical peak of 88.88 teraflops. This makes it the 20th most powerful supercomputer on the planet, according to the Top 500 Project which compiles a list of the relative performance of these machines.
Nasa has used its current supercomputer to investigate the performance of hypersonic aircraft, simulate lander deployments and model fabrics for future spacesuits."This additional computational performance is necessary to help us achieve breakthrough scientific discoveries," said Mr Worden.
Q.1 Whats coming up in 2012 that NASA need this kind of Super computer?
Q.2 What kind of "breakthrough scientific discoveries" Mr Worden talking about?
Source :BBC News
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