Petaflops At War -- Strategy Page June 7, 2010: DARPA, the U.S. Department of Defense advanced research organization, has asked computer hardware developers to come up with a very powerful supercomputer (speed of one petaflop, or a million billion floating point operations per second, otherwise known as FLOPS), that is small enough to fit into a cabinet 61x198x102 cm (24x78x40 inches) and require no more than 57 kilowatts to operate (including cooling). This ExtremeScale supercomputer would be flown out to combat zones, run off generator power and perform analysis of images and other data, to determine where the enemy is and what they are up to. This sort of predictive analysis have become a major weapon in the last decade, and it needs more computer power to be even more useful. There are currently portable PC cards that will goose a PC up to 20 teraflops (a thousand billion FLOPS). Currently, the most powerful PC can do 50 gigaflops (billion FLOPS). That, in turn, is faster than the fastest supercomputers of the early 1990s. In this area, progress isn't marching on, it's sprinting.
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My Comment: With video information and surveillance assuming a greater role for the military, greater and faster processing power will be required .... hence the need for superior (and transportable) computers.
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