Over just the past couple of years, supercomputing has accelerated into the exascale era—with the world’s most massive machines capable of performing over a billion operations per second. But unless big efficiency improvements can intervene along its exponential growth curve, computing is also anticipated to require increasingly impractical and unsustainable amounts of energy—even, according to one widely cited study, by 2040 demanding more energy than the world’s total present-day output.
Over just the past couple of years, supercomputing has accelerated into the exascale era—with the world’s most massive machines capable of performing over a billion operations per second. But unless big efficiency improvements can intervene along its exponential growth curve, computing is also anticipated to require increasingly impractical and unsustainable amounts of energy—even, according to one widely cited study, by 2040 demanding more energy than the world’s total present-day output.