Beginning in 2021, the U.S. Department of Energy will deploy the first of three exascale computers capable of one quintillion floating-point operations per second for scientific and national security research.
Exascale computers certainly have their place and quantum computers aren't suited for every kind of problem, but there is a growing buzz—and it's all about quantum! “This new kind of computing could revolutionize scientific discovery and advance technology from clean energy to precision medicine,” Ashby says. “No individual or even a single institution will achieve the quantum quest. It will take a team of experts, drawing on a range of capabilities, to realize the promise of quantum computing,” he added.