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An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop, itself a thousand times faster than a teraflop. Teraflop computers — the first was developed 10 years ago at Sandia — currently are the state of the art. They do trillions of calculations a second. Exaflop computers would perform a million trillion calculations per second.

The idea behind the institute — under consideration for a year and a half prior to its opening — is "to close critical gaps between theoretical peak performance and actual performance on current supercomputers," says Sandia project lead Sudip Dosanjh. "We believe this can be done by developing novel and innovative computer architectures."