Petaflop Essay Contest

Based on current calculations using tens of terafiops on the LLNL BG/L supercomputer, our proposed simulation would require 128x more computing power - in other words, several petafiops for approximately three months. This level of computing could provide a glimpse of the early universe as we've never seen it before and lead to a dramatic improvement in our understanding of the interactions of nature's smallest particles - quarks - which also comprise its largest visible structures.