Towards exascale computing

Due to hardware limitations, parallel computing became an integral part of our lives that it is hard to imagine a device that is not using multiprocessor power, including smartphones. What started as a hardware solution to physical limitation, prompted software engineers to adopt to parallelism. This in turn, compelled theoretical computer scientists to develop theoretical solutions to algorithms design and analysis to provide a solution that is parallel oriented rather than a serial oriented one, using divide-and-conquer algorithm design technique. Due to the exponential growth in high performance computing, the fastest computer in the world is projected to run at one Exaflop/s by 2020, or 10
¹⁸
operation/second, ushering the era of exascale computing. As we move towards exascale computing and beyond, we need to keep in mind that the power of humanity is not in the powerful machines we develop, but remains in our intelligence and ability to develop solutions to problems at the basic level.