How fast is fast?

New Mexico Business Journal, Nov, 2001

Some time next year, bragging rights for the world's fastest computer will go to Los Alamos National Laboratory Called, without much imagination, "Q" the computer will be capable of 30 trillion calculations per second, which is more than twice as fast as the current record-holder at LANL's sister lab, Lawrence Livermore in California.

Q will have more than 11,000 computer chips lashed together and will be housed in a room the size of a football field. Fully 10 percent of all the electricity piped into Los Alamos, which includes the town, will be used in the new computer building, which, by the way, has enough air conditioning to cool some 500 homes. The computing power is needed by nuclear weapons designers to simulate explosions. We don't know how long LANL can hold title to the world's fastest computer, but the way things move these days, it probably won't be very long, but certainly more than a week or two.