Atos aims to deliver an exaflop supercomputer to French government by 2020

Computer manufacturer Atos has named its first customer for Bull sequana, a supercomputer design it hopes will reach exaflop levels of performance by 2020. Atos is building the computer for the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), it said Tuesday. By targeting 2020 for delivery of an exaflop supercomputer, Atos is entering a race in which China and Japan may already have a head-start. An exaflop is a billion billion floating-point operations per second (flops). That's way more than today's fastest machine can manage: China's Tianhe-2 has a maximum performance of 33.9 petaflops (millions of billions of flops), according to the November 2015 edition of the Top500 supercomputer rankings.