Computers are crunching more numbers than ever to crack the most complex problems of our time -- how to cure diseases like COVID and cancer, mitigate climate change and more. These and other grand challenges ushered computing into today's exascale era when top performance is often measured in exaflops. An exaflop is a measure of performance for a supercomputer that can calculate at least 1018 or one quintillion floating point operations per second. In exaflop, the exa- prefix means a quintillion, that's a billion billion, or one followed by 18 zeros. Similarly, an exabyte is a memory subsystem packing a quintillion bytes of data.

One thing is certain: The explosion of data creation in our society will continue as far as pundits and anyone else can forecast. In response, there is an insatiable demand for more advanced high performance computing to make this data useful. The IT industry has been pushing to new levels of high-end computing performance; this is the dawn of the exascale era of computing. Recent announcements from the US Department of Energy for exascale computers represent the starting point for a new generation of computing advances. This is critical for the advancement of any number of use cases such as understanding the interactions underlying the science of weather, sub-atomic structures, genomics, physics, rapidly emerging artificial intelligence applications, and other important scientific fields.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced it will deliver the industry's most comprehensive high-performance computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) portfolio for the exascale era, which is characterized by explosive data growth and new converged workloads such as HPC, AI, and analytics. The addition of Cray, Inc., which HPE recently acquired, bolsters HPE's HPC and AI solutions to now encompass an end-to-end supercomputing architecture across compute, interconnect, software, storage and services, delivered on premises, hybrid or as-a-Service. Now every enterprise can leverage the same foundational HPC technologies that power the world's fastest systems, and integrate them into their data centers to unlock insights and fuel new discovery. Digital transformation is driving new data-intensive workloads and real-time analytics operating at an unprecedented scale. New software, compute, interconnect, and storage capabilities are required for customers to unlock the potential of their data and accelerate innovation.

We're about to enter the "exascale era" of computing, which could have widespread positive impacts for governments, businesses and society at large. The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced contracts for supercomputers that will each provide more than an exaflop of performance. That means they can perform 1 quintillion mathematical calculations (called floating-point operations, or flops) every second. The work done on these systems will impact all our lives. And the technologies developed for them will enhance computing systems at all scales, transforming the future of the enterprise.