At SC16, the international conference for high performance computing networking, storage and analysis held this week in Salt Lake City (USA), ExaScaler and PEZY Computing unveiled ZettaScaler-1.8, the first supercomputer with an Rpeak performance density of 1.5 PetaFlop/m3. It is an advanced prototype of the ZettaScaler-2.0 due for release in 2017 with a performance density three times higher than the 1.8 version.

How this performance relates to other supercomputers is hard to tell for non-specialists like us. The latest Cray XC50 supercomputer for instance boasts a performance of one PetaFlop (PFlop) in a single cabinet. But how big is that cabinet?

Currently, according to the supercomputer Top 500, the fastest supercomputer is the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight; its 10,649,600 computing cores comprising 40,960 nodes achieve an Rpeak value of 125,436 TFlop/s.

But... how many seconds fit in a cubic meter?