By 2024, the largest radio telescope ever will dot the landscape of either Australia or South Africa with thousands of antennae spread out over 2,000 miles. The Square Kilometre Array will record the equivalent of an Internet's worth of data twice a day, and IBM is building a computer that can handle it all.

Every six months, a new list of the top 500 fastest supecomputers in the world comes out, and today was the day. The big news is that we've cracked 10 petaflops, but compared to six months ago, the list itself will probably surprise you.

There's a continual race between nations to have the fastest supercomputer, but besides vague long-term things like climate modeling or nuclear warhead stability, it's sometimes hard to see the results of all this computing power. Finally, a supercomputer has done something useful, and figured out how to save truckers fuel.

Intel, DARPA, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center have launched an eight year project to create the most powerful computer ever constructed. By 2018, the extreme scale supercomputer will be running exaflop-level calculations: that's a million trillion operations every second, or about a thousand times faster than the fastest supercomputer we've got today.