This is either right or wrong depending on how you calculate it.

The editors and reporters of PolitiFact, an independent fact-checking journalism website.

May 6, 2016

Imagine what we can do now that we have supercomputing capacity. We can now do a thousand billion calculations per second — a thousand billion calculations per second.

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Vice President Biden

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This is either right or wrong depending on how you calculate it. A thousand billion is a trillion. However, the U.S.’s Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory can do 27 quadrillion calculations per second, or 27 million trillion — 27,000 times faster than Biden said. More detail here: http://thediplomat.com/2015/08/us-to-challenge-china-for-worlds-fastest-supercomputer/

When we asked Biden’s office for clarification, a spokeswoman said that while there are some premier facilities such as the Titan that possess the capacity to do 27 quadrillion calculations per second, many supercomputers fall closer to the range Biden cited, including those that were among the fastest in the world as of a few years ago. They said this statistic had been included in his speech after consultations with national laboratory officials. More information about the capacity within the National Labs can be found at http://www.top500.org/list/2013/06/.