Researchers at Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories have launched the Institute for Advanced Architectures to do basic research on issues such as power consumption and reliability for an exaflop (10^18 floating point operations per second) system that could have a million hundred-core processors.

The U.S. Department of Energy and the National Security Agency expect to need exaflop computing by 2018 for large-scale prediction, materials science analysis, fusion research, and national security problems.

Ray Kurzweil has estimated that 10^16 floating point operations/sec. (10 petaflops) is sufficient to functionally simulate all of the regions of the human brain (see chapter 3 of The Singularity Is Near) – Ed.