The federal government is turning its attention, and its money, to supercomputing. The government hopes to build supercomputers that break the current barriers in terms of computing speed, far beyond those topping the annual list of fastest systems in the world. Right now those on the Top 500 Supercomputer List are hitting multiple TFLOPS, or teraFLOPS--a trillion floating-point operations per second. But Uncle Sam wants to build PFLOPS or petaFLOPS systems--a quadrillion floating-point operations per second. Cray Inc. is already signed on to build such a system for the Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Computing experts say the investment and development of such computing environments will "change the way we do computational science."

For more on the need for compute speed:
- check out this article at ComputerWorld