I recently read a Frank Munger article in the Knoxville News Sentinel about the new super computer that should begin operation this summer. "Super computer" in this case means 1000 trillion calculations per second. In computer lingo, this is a petaflop.

The computer, which will be used by university researchers, will begin arriving soon. The first of three phases will be delivered by Cray Inc. soon enough to be plugged in this summer. Another third will arrive in 2009, and the final third in 2010. A grant by the National Science Foundation makes all of this possible.

This is interesting to me for a number of reasons. First, it will be located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where my wife worked until she retired. It will be housed in a new building at the National Institute for Computational Sciences on the ORNL campus, about 12 miles from my home.

Many years ago when the Apple 2E was the state of the art, it became apparent to me that computers had the ability to search and analyze a lot of material in a very short time. I probably wasn't thinking of petaflops or teraflops, but I could imagine how computers could find a needle in a haystack.

We are not even through the first decade of the 21st Century. What will the second decade bring?
Howard