ics technology will be used in the Blue Waters supercomputer, which will be installed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana, Illinois in the Summer of 2011. This system, which is based on large blade clusters of IBM's 8-core POWER7 chip, will have a maximum peak throughput of 10 Petaflop/s, roughly four times faster than the Tianhe-1. It will also be much more compact and power-efficient as well, making it the most "green" supercomputer ever created.
However, even the Blue Waters supercomputer will become a clunky dinosaur once more and more nanophotonics elements are integrated onto microprocessors and replace many of the functions that traditional semiconductors perform today. And as with all supercomputing technologies, the equivalent of N minus 2 generations of processor performance will quickly find their way into enterprise systems and even consumer electronics.
Projected technological progression of photonics integration in supercomputing (IBM)
Eventually, perhaps by the year 2020 or even sooner, nanophotonic supercomputers will exist that approach the Exaflop range in terms of performance. What's an Exaflop? Well, try measuring the aggregate performance of about 250 Blue Waters or 1000 Tianhe-1A supercomputers and that's what you'll get. Did your head just explode? No? Because mine just did.
So with Exaflop-level supercomputing and enterprise computing, or even Petaflop-level consumer computing, just what exactly can you do with all of that processing power?
Well, with Exaflop/s, you can do the sort of things that take current supercomputers weeks or years to do in only minutes or days. It would allow the average citizen to gene sequence their babies the moment they are born to anticipate future diseases for an entire lifetime, or sequence their own DNA and apply corrective action as needed, such as synthesize custom medications.
It would allow for the real-time simulation of complex systems such as world weather and allow for meteorological science to advance at a level approaching magic or witchcraft -- the ability to accurately model how destructive storms such as tornadoes and hurricanes actually work and form, and accurately predict how they will behave.
It would permit our various government intelligence agencies, such as the National Security Agency and well as the National Reconnaissance Office to perform advanced signal intelligence (SIGINT) and space imaging in real time, determine threats to our national security and respond to it in kind with military strikes and with covert operations almost instantaneously. It would completely re-define what we understand today as rapid response and operational readiness.
The very same technology used for military applications, along with a much larger global array of radio telescopes than what we possess today, could also be used to perform much more comprehensive real-time signal spectrum analysis of extraterrestrial radio emissions and actually allow SETI to prove the existence of the E.T's we've been trying to locate for over 40 years, if those signals do indeed exist.
Beyond brute force computational applications, Exaflop and commodity Petaflop computing will almost certainly allow for the creation of intelligent robots and software agents, perhaps as brilliant as a trained circus dog, an advanced primate, a five year old child, or even more depending on advancements in computer learning.
It would allow for the real-time rendering of computer-generated imagery from today's biggest and most expensive Hollywood blockbuster films (or even better) in virtual reality or virtual worlds for the average citizen. These types of games and fully-immersive artificial realities would make the most advanced XBOX 360 or Playstation 3 first-person game look about as sophisticated as PONG.
Essentially, we're talking about the delivery of The Matrix as a commercial software product.
There are certainly other applications for commodity Petaflop and Exaflop supercomputing that people haven't even dreamed of yet. But I think we can say for sure tha