Exoflops and Other Seemingly Made Up Words

Picture Credit: Popular Mechanics

What in the world is an Exoflop? Is that similar to a belly flop?

An Exoflop, however made up the word may sound, will soon be the next backbone of the supercomputer arms race happening in the world today. Computer calculations are usually calculated in flops, or the amount of tasks that can be accomplished each second. according to Popular Mechanic’s Website, “…the world’s fastest supercomputer is coming to the United States in 2021 and will be the first to break the so-called ‘exascale’ barrier.” This supercomputer will be the fastest of its kind and will allow the United States to house the fastest supercomputer on the planet, capable of one exoflop in speed. This computer will be able to accomplish one quintillion calculations per second, which is an absurd number. Named Aurora, the supercomputer will be built and housed in Chicago and will be built using Intel’s technology. With a $500 million investment from the Department of Energy to be built, the computer is set to be up and running by 2021.

How can flip-flops and Exoflops change the way we look at the world?

National Security

With a supercomputer this large and powerful in the hands of our domestic facilities, we can expect some serious advantages courtesy of Aurora. In the capable hands of our nation’s hackers and computer scientists, we can expect some serious defense upgrades to our infrastructure that has been called into question lately. With suspicions of a Russian hack changing election results in the recent news, ethical hackers can use the extremely powerful supercomputer to find the weaknesses of our firewalls and computers before our enemies do.

Artificial Intelligence

With the entire tech news cycle being dominated of talk of “AI” lately, we can use this massive supercomputer to teach and create new forms of AI to be used in all sorts of applications. With this amount of power, we can create algorithms that can harness the flops of computational power to our advantage and create things that we never thought could be possible.

Jake Standerwick

Sources:

https://www.popsci.com/aurora-supercomputer-quintillion-operations#page-3

https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a26886243/first-exascale-computer/