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Noor had not come for a tour of the machine room . A storm in her model was still a smear : the cloud was not a cloud , only a number tuned so the rest of the atmosphere would behave . She wanted a grid fine enough that the cloud would have edges . The class of machine that can attempt that is called exascale , able to carry out at least one quintillion floating - point operations in a second . Frontier , at Oak Ridge National Laboratory , was the first of them to appear on the public lists past that line . The system under this floor was built on the same bargain . Ellis , who held the schedule , did not quarrel with the cloud . He quarreled with the socket . The useful arithmetic on these machines sits mostly on accelerators , large fields of smaller processors that earn their speed by repeating one kind of sum . They are there because that pattern returns more work for the electricity than a hall of ordinary chips . It does not return the work for free . A job the size of the whole coast , written at the scale Noor wanted , would run long enough to push other science off the week , and the cooling loop would have to carry the heat the entire time . The liquid in the pipes was how the room stayed habitable . She tried the usual trims . A slower clock in the idle phases . A cap so the draw could not spike . Ellis could already do those . None of them turned a continent of air into a small guest . The efficiency sat inside each operation . The cost sat in how many operations she insisted on buying . He slid her map across the desk . She ringed one coastline , the stretch where the storm came ashore , and left the open ocean coarse . The cloud would have edges where a harbor master had to care . Far offshore , it could remain a tuned number . Ellis looked at the ring , then at the queue , and gave the night a size it could hold . Noor left with less of the planet than she had named , and with a run that would actually start . The quintillion had not repealed the electricity . It had only decided which stretch of coast was small enough to ask about .
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