Abstract :
The speed of high-performance computing has soared from around 100 gigaflops in 1993 to over 50 petaflops today and is on course to hit the longsought exascale (1018 floating- point operations per second) mark in the 2020s. Yet this remarkable supercomputing progress can be something of a super nightmare for the institutes and government agencies asked to invest the hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars that leading systems can cost.
