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LiveScience
LiveScience
Peter Ray Allison

Exascale computing is here — what does this new era of computing mean and what are exascale supercomputers capable of?

(Image credit: CasarsaGuru/Getty Images)

Exascale computing is the latest milestone in cutting-edge supercomputers — high-powered systems capable of processing calculations at speeds currently impossible using any other method.

Exascale supercomputers are computers that run at the exaflop scale. The prefix "exa" denotes 1 quintillion, which is 1 x 1018 — or a one with 18 zeroes after it. Flop stands for "Floating point operations per second," a type of calculation used to benchmark computers for comparison purposes.

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