A Lot

According to this article, by the end of the decade Cray Inc. hopes to produce a supercomputer that will perform a quintillion calculations per second. That’s 1 000 000 000 000 000 000, a billion billion. Imagine doing something a billion times, and then doing that a billion times, all in one second. I also like to imagine people (just like you and me) in some future century looking back at accomplishments like this and being amused at how quaint and primitive our early attempts were. ‘Awesome,’ they might think to themselves, ‘We could show them awsome....’