Los Alamos National Labs’ new “Q” 30 teramips supercomputer requires a 300,000-square-foot building and 7 megawatts of electricity for cooling — ten percent of all the electricity piped into Los Alamos Labs and surrounding community.While today’s fastest machine can perform 10 trillion calculations a second, visionaries are thinking about machines 100 times faster.

That is probably eight or nine years away, Mike Vildibill, deputy director at San Diego Supercomputer Center said, and the problems are substantial.

“The power requirements would be extreme,” he said. “The facilities requirements are huge.”