Vayu -- Capable of Operating at 140 Teraflops -- Australia's New Top Super Computer. (November 17, 2009)

The National Computational Infrastructure's director Lindsay Botten says the 11,936 processor core Sun-based supercomputer will have 12 times the processing power of its predecessor and is expected to be fully operational before the end of the year.

At 140 teraflops  (i.e. 140 trillion floating point operations per second) Vayu (lord of the winds) will rank in the top 30-40 of the world's super computers. The four-year-old SGI Altix 3700 is now considered a relic, were it a car you might say the NCI got cash to replace a clunker.

The CSIRO and the ANU each paid more than $3 million, for which they get about a quarter of the machine and one of the Vayu's main uses will be helping to model climate change. "About 70 per cent of the work CSIRO have on their share will be in climate science," Professor Botten said. "The ANU will use its share across a wide variety of fields, a lot of physics, a lot of chemistry, a lot of computational biology and astronomy."

Despite its power Professor Botten is already considering its replacement in 2011-12 and expects it to be about 12 times as powerful again which in fact would be a bit below the current title holder  on the super computer stakes. Currently the world's fastest system resides at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to the just released Top500 list. It's a Cray XT5 system, the Jaguar, which has 224,256 processing cores from six-core Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). It is capable of a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops, (2,300 teraflops).

And to give you an idea of how quickly things are moving the US Department of Energy, which is responsible for funding many of the world's largest systems, wants two machines between 2011-13 that will reach near 10 petaflops. However, come 2018 the expectation is that the 1,000 petaflop (1 exaflop) will come online.

According to US Computer World: "Before exascale arrives, petaflop systems will continue to grow in size, and government-funded efforts to build massive systems seems to be on the rise. Fujitsu is planning a 10-petaflop computer in 2011 for Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, and China has now reached petaflop scale.

One of the most computer intensive problems remains climate modelling.