by Patrick Thibodeau
To make a point about China’s interest in supercomputing, David Turek, IBM’s vice president of deep computing, displayed a slide with a picture depicting a large construction site for a building that will house a massive computer.

It’s not just China that’s rushing to build supercomputing centers, but Europe and Japan as well, said Turek and other forum participants.

“You have sovereign nations making material investments of a tremendous magnitude to basically eat our lunch, eat our collective lunch,” Turek said.

The intent of the forum was to update attendees on efforts that are underway to build the next generation of supercomputers — exaflop systems that will be 1,000 times more powerful than today’s petaflop systems. A petaflop is a quadrillion, or 1,000 trillion, sustained floating-point operations per second. An exaflop is 1 quintillion, or 1 million trillion, floating-point operations per second.

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