You may not have noticed, but technology has passed a significant, if little-recognised, milestone. The news emerged only this week, but late last month a supercomputer built for the United States Government performed what is known as a petaflop, or one quadrillion calculations per second.
Few of us know what a quadrillion looks like (in Europe it’s known as a billiard), so, if you’re curious, here’s one you can study in private: 1,000,000,000,000,000. Big, isn’t it?
Mathematicians have calculated that a quadrillion-high stack of five-cent coins would reach Saturn, but that’s probably not much easier to visualise. Or spend…
