Once in a while, it is nice to step away from day to day life and dream big. Exascale computing is one of those big dreams. There is a goal to get there in 10 years (now we are in peta scale computing). A couple of snippets from this CNN article:
“We’re talking about machines with millions of processors where each processor has 1,000 cores,” said John West, special assistant to the director of the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center Information Technology Laboratory.
“Now there are many, many, many more people that use our computers, but there’s about 100,000 of us that build them, run them and program them. And that’s a really small community when you think about 10 million C [computer language] programmers that are working on everything from games to SAP [software] installation.”
If you want to track this information, here are some good resources:
A list of the 500 most powerful computer systems