That's 1,000 times faster than the fastest conventional computer today, which cranks out a mere billion calculations at the blink of an eye. We're talking super fast. It takes 32,000 years for a trillion seconds to tick away. At a trillion calculations a second, a teraflop machine will make calculations in 3.6 seconds that currently take an hour. It will solve problems in a few hours that now require 100 days.
Most current computers are sequential computers.
They solve problems one step at a time. The fastest of these sequential computers is capable of taking large amounts of numbers through a circuit called a pipeline, which works in the same way as an assembly line. One part of the machine does the same job over and over and then passes the completed part to another stage. The heart of the sequential computer is the processor, a single silicon chip smaller than a fingernail and capable of executing simple instructions. The Y-MP C90, introduced in November by Cray Research Inc., has 16.