Propelled by advances in the fields of compute, storage, networking and software, the performance of leading systems has increased one trillion-fold since the unveiling of the CDC 6600 in 1964, from the millions of floating point operations per second (megaFLOPS) to the quintillions (exaFLOPS).The current holder of the crown, a colossal US-based supercomputer called Frontier, is capable of achieving 1.102 exaFLOPS by the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark.The arrival of so-called exascale supercomputers is expected to benefit practically all sectors - from science to cybersecurity, healthcare to finance - and set the stage for mighty new AI models that would otherwise have taken years to train.The Wilkes3 (opens in new tab), for example, is positioned only 100th in the overall performance charts (opens in new tab), but sits in third place in the Green500 (opens in new tab), a ranking of HPC systems based on performance per watt of energy consumed.For example, by lowering the clock speed at which some components were running, depending on the workload, the team was able to achieve energy consumption reductions in the region of 20-30%."