Supercomputing is beating Moore’s Law, with power for the same price doubling every 15 months.

NEC’s new Earth Simulator, rated at 35 teraflops is the world’s fastest and will ultimately act as Japan’s early warning of typhoons. But IBM’s 200 teraflops Blue Gene/L will soon top the list.

The next challenge for the supercomputing community is a petaflops machine, capable of a quadrillion floating-point operations per second.