The US may have just pulled even with China in the race to build supercomputing's next big thing

There was much celebrating in America last month when the US Department of Energy unveiled Summit, the world's fastest supercomputer. Now the race is on to achieve the next significant milestone in processing power: exascale computing. This involves building a machine within the next few years that's capable of a billion billion calculations per second, or one exaflop, which would make it five times faster than Summit (see chart). Every person on Earth would have to do a calculation every second of every day for just over four years to match what an exascale machine will be able to do in a flash. This phenomenal power will enable researchers to run massively complex simulations that spark advances in many fields, from climate science to genomics, renewable energy, and artificial intelligence.