Since the dawn of computers, scientific users have pushed the performance envelope. Today, HPC systems discover new wonder drugs, map genomes, simulate airplane wings and perform a million other important tasks. The need for compute cycles is almost unbounded. As demand for power grows, we begin to discover physical and economic limits. The largest supercomputers use several megawatts; enough to power thousands of homes. To reach exascale levels, we need 1,000 times more compute capability than today's petascale systems. But, since gigawatt supercomputers aren't feasible, we can't just take 1,000 times more power to do it. We need more compute per Watt.
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