In processor technology, hafnium is more and more being used. The large companies are all preparing 45nm chips. Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are now in the main stream of HPC. They ae an important port of delivering high speeds at relatively low power consumption. The IBM PowerCell is one obvious example. Specilized GPU company NVIDIA has announced the Tesla S1070 with 933 Gflop/s peak per GPU. Clearspeed has announcde the next generation of its accelerators. The Xlinx Vertex5 LX330 will appear soon.

The Roadrunner maybe the most significant machine, the IBM Bue Gene/P is also important, Thoams Sterling said. With 223 Tflop/s peak it is the fastest system in Europe. The Blu Gene is still "in the race".

In Japan, NEC has announced the Earth simulator will be upgraded to 134 Tflop/s. This can also be considere a "mid-life kicker". The other important development in Japan is the development of the 10 Petaflop/s supercomputer KEISOKU under leadership of RIKEN Research in Kobe. The total system development will cost about USD 950 million.

European HPC is also in growth mode, Sterling said. India is, for the first time, in teh TOP10. The interesting new sfrom China is that they are developing their own processor: the Loonsong. This means the emerging HPC market in CHina can buy everything in the country; procesors, systems and services.

In the USA, the NSF "track 2" systems are coming online: the

TACC "Ranger" in Texas, went into prodcution on February 4th 2008. The "Blue waters" at UIUC/NSCA will have Petascal/s performance.

The first workshops on Exascale computing have been held. The IAA announced the creation of a new institute for architectures and algortihms in this field. New hardware chips could be based on graphene: a sheet of carbon atoms arangend in a hexagon pattern. Programming Exascale systems is something few even dare to think about, A million or so nodes with many-core processors at each node is way beyond today's capabilities. Compiler technologies also poses a challenge.

While Petaflop/s prepares to become mainstream a glimpse of the future of Exascale is already visible, Thomas Sterling did conclude.