What Is The Next Major Goal In Supercomputing?

We have a new entry in the global race for reaching the next milestone in computing. China has joined the other two eternal rivals - U.S. And Japan for the supreme goal - The 1,000trillion Operations! Well, "supreme" for now, at least.

According to Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer and vice president of Chiaro Networks, a technology provider for high-performance computing, it's more a matter of national pride : "the Chinese want to be viewed as a Tier 1 country in every respect".

China has now 19 supercomputers rated amongst the 500 fastest machines, and they want to take that higher on their own, aware of the importance of the development of high-performance computing not dependent on the U.S.
Some recent reports state that both Japan and China are planning new investments in breaking the computing performance barrier known as the petaflop - the ability of performing 1,000 trillion mathematical operations per second.

At this time, the world's fastest computer is Blue Gene/L built by IBM and placed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , that has reached more than 136 trillion operations a second and plans to double that by year's end.
" This machines can be used to answer questions that literally will mean life or death of humanity", said Peter A. Freeman, assistant director at National Science Foundation."

Although the competition for breaking the petaflop has divided the best specialists in the field into different camps, they all have to agree on something: the costs for the new supercomputers due to run by the end of the decade, add up to $1billion for each machine.

Meaning that the answers that mean life or death of humanity are pretty expensive, even for big players like U.S., Japan, China or France.