In the 60′s and 70′s there were movies about powerful computers coming to life and destroying people.  Star Trek had “The Ultimate Computer” that Captain Kirk talked to death.  2001: A Space Odyssey had the HAL 9000 that thought it knew better than the astronauts and started killing them.   A few years later was  Colussus:  The Forbin Project where a super computer is put in control of America’s nuclear arsenal to eliminate irrational human actions.  It links up with a Soviet computer designed for the same purpose and enslaves mankind under the threat of nuclear holocaust.  In 1979 the film War Games had a weapons control computer WOPR that learned nuclear war was unwinnable.

These movies have dropped off since computers have become ubiquitous to daily life.  Any evil is due to human misuse of a tool, not a silicon conscience.

Which brings us to the point. Ultimate computers do not remain ultimate for long.  Today’s most powerful computer will be a punchline at a computer convention in 5 years.  “You’ve got one of those?  My cell phone has more capability!”

Computer power is measured in floating point operations per second, or flops. A Teraflop is a trillion flops.  Powerful data center computers used by Google and credit card companies use run 100′s of Teraflops.  Just as home computer power progressed from Kilo to Mega to Giga, super computers are jumping from Tera to Peta.  A quadrillion flops.

What does one do with such a computer? For one, chemical reactions can be simulated in a computer.  Not adding baking soda to vinegar reactions, but vastly complex reactions such as adding an enzyme to a carbohydrate to create a sugar that can be fermented into ethanol.  Instead of running numerous test-tube trials to find the best result it can be done in a computer much faster. I do not know how these reactions are turned into mathematical equations and computer code but they are.

My employer, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), is planning a super computer and being the Department of Energy prime Save Energy Lab its goal is to be the most energy efficient data center in the world.

An IBM representative explained the rapid progress in the last few years.

2005:  100 Teraflops; 34 computer servers, 10,000 square feet, 3,400 kilowatts electric load. (A kilowatt will run an average American house.)

2008:  100 Teraflops;  8 servers, 2,500 square feet, 875 kilowatts

2011:  100 Teraflops:  1 server, 800 square feet, 175 kilowatts

While space and power needs have decreased the hunger for more computing capacity is limitless.  With every generation more computing power is packed into the same computer room.  Less energy is used for each flop but the equipment is packed denser and denser.  A single computer server that once used 5 kW now uses 60.  The limit is cooling the microprocessor.  Home computers use fans.  Super computers use cooling water piped right to the chip.  The 175 kW server is an 8 foot cube yet it produces enough waste heat to warm 8 large houses on a cold winter day. There is no way to blow enough air over the chip to cool it.  Like a car engine, it needs a radiator.

When NREL first discussed its computer with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Cray in 2007 they said our proposed 400 Teraflop computer would be in the top 12 in the world.  Yes, but we won’t actually get it until 2012.  Oh, by then 400 Teraflop wouldn’t make the top 100 list.

NREL is building a new research facility to study integrating large amounts of renewable energy onto the electric grid. It will open in 2012.  Part of the project is $12 million for a  super computer.  NREL will wait until the last moment to get the latest generation machine.  Once in place it will busily sort 400 trillion 1′s and 0′s every second.  It will toil for a few years and then be replaced with a Petaflop-scale machine.  That machine will run a few years and be replaced a yet more powerful computer.

In the future veteran NREL computer guys will be telling stories about when this super computer center opened in 2012 it had 400 Teraflops “and we thought that was really something!” A young new hire will snort, “Teraflops?  You’re kidding me.  My cell phone has more power than that!”