The cryptocurrency industry has long feared the day when computers will be able to crack blockchains and take down networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum; that day may be closer than they think—but even at today’s supercomputer speeds, only quantum computers could have that potential.

Last week, researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that their latest supercomputer, El Capitan, is able to conduct 2.79 quadrillion calculations per second, making it the world’s fastest computer.

To grasp the magnitude, that’s 2.79—followed by 15 zeroes.

“To put this in some perspective, it would take more than a million of the latest iPhones working on one calculation at the same time to equal what El Capitan can do in one second,” Jeremy Thomas of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory told Decrypt. “That’s a stack of phones over 5 miles high.”

The results were announced during the annual SC Conference, an international conference focused on high-performance computing in Atlanta, Georgia on Monday. El Capitan was named number one on the list of the Top 500 Project’s biannual list of the 500 mos

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Author: Jason Nelson