Intel has struck a new agreement with Cray that the companies hope will lead to technological breakthroughs in the field of supercomputers and high-performance computing.

Kirk Skaugen, vice president of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group, said their combined technology could lead to supercomputers that should easily pass a petaflop in performance (10¹⁵ or 1 quadrillion calculations per second) to deliver an exaflop, which is 10¹⁸ calculations per second–1,000 times greater than a petaflop.