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| Computer power is often measured in "flops", which stands for FLoating point Operations Per Second. "Floating point" is the format computers use to store decimals like 4.5123. Doing ten muplications in a second would be a speed of 10 flops. Modern supercomputers can do millions and millions of these sums every second, and are measured in gigaflops (GFLOPS, or 1000,000,000) or teraflops (TFLOPS or 1000,000,000,000). | |
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The most powerful computer in the world is the Earth Simulator in Japan, which is used for modelling climate change and the movement of the earth's surface. It has 10 Tb of main memory and 5120 processors. It can run at speeds of up to 40 TeraFlops. |
 Press start and do ten multiplications as fast as you can! |
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The US has plans to build a much more powerful computer, called ASCI Purple. It will cost $100 million and have 12,544 processors. It should be more than twice as fast as the Earth Simulator. |
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