Question

About how many floating-point operations can a supercomputer perform each year?

a) 1 × 10¹⁸ operations
b) 1 × 10¹⁵ operations
c) 1 × 10¹⁷ operations
d) 1 × 10¹⁶ operations

Answer 1

A supercomputer can perform approximately 3.65 x 10^24 floating-point operations each year.

Step-by-step explanation:

A supercomputer is capable of performing approximately 1022 floating-point operations in a day. To estimate how many floating-point operations a supercomputer can do in a year, we can assume there are 365 days in a year. Therefore, the approximate number of floating-point operations a supercomputer can perform each year would be 1022 x 365 = 3.65 x 1024 operations. Therefore, the correct answer is option c) 1 × 10¹⁷ operations.