By: TOP500 Team

Today, the list of the 500 fastest supercomputers is dominated by computers based on semiconducting circuitry. Ten years from now, will superconducting computers start to take some of those slots?

Last week, IARPA, the U.S. intelligence community’s high-risk research arm, announced that it had awarded its first set of research contracts in a multi-year effort to develop a superconducting computer. The program, called Cryogenic Computing Complexity (C3), is designed to develop the components needed to construct such a computer as well as a working prototype.

If the program succeeds, it could potentially be a big boon to the makers of supercomputers. The ubiquitous CMOS-based technology we use to make those systems is proving difficult to scale up without consuming staggering amounts of power. 

Read the full article on IEEE Spectrum.