Super Size Computing

America is afraid. And it's about time. America is afraid of being left behind in the innovation race. Innovation is what will keep America at the top of the GDP list -- they can no longer compete in the standardized, commoditized world, where new players, such as the Asians, dominate. In order to innovate, and compete with those pesky Asians, America needs to increase the pace of prototyping to production, and the only way of doing that is by having raw computing power on its side. The race is therefore on to break the petaflop barrier -- a computer with the capacity of doing 1 quadrillion mathematical computations per second. Today's top supercomputers come in at just under a measly 40 teraflops. Researchers are hoping to hit a petaflop within the next 10 years.