The fastest supercomputers in the world today solve problems at the petascale—that is a quadrillion (10¹⁵) calculations each second.

While these petascale systems are quite powerful, the next milestone in computing achievement is the exascale—a higher level of performance in computing that will have profound impacts on everyday life.

At a quintillion (10¹⁸) calculations each second, exascale supercomputers will more realistically simulate the processes involved in precision medicine, regional climate, additive manufacturing, the conversion of plants to biofuels, the relationship between energy and water use, the unseen physics in materials discovery and design, the fundamental forces of the universe, and much more.

Exascale computing will have a profound impact on everyday life in the coming decades. At 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second, exascale supercomputers will be able to quickly analyze massive volumes of data and more realistically simulate the complex processes and relationships behind many of the fundamental forces of the universe.

This will have practical applications in everything from precision medicine to regional climate, water use to materials science, nuclear physics to national security. Exascale computing has the potential to drive discoveries across the spectrum of scientific fields—and to improve both our understanding of the world and how we live in it.