Another challenge to Reagan and his group is how to keep up with all of the growing computing power and the associated data movement. A petabyte is a thousand terabytes or a million gigabytes or a billion megabytes. Yet, scientists are currently working on problems, that would take a year to solve, even working at teraflop speed. They calculate reaction rates. They calculate how fast chemical processes proceed and then predict how proteins interact to support cellular functions.
All chemists use reaction rate information and apply it to the specific problems they have.
Scientists can also use large computers to study molecules from which proteins can be created that can combine with viruses, making them unable to invade cells. This has great potential in drug design. More powerful computers will allow climatologists to study the interaction of the ocean and the air to a higher degree of accuracy to predict global climate changes. For now, they take a large number of cases and take the average. Each run can take several months.