Every year, the SLING consortium organises an Open Day of Slovenian Supercomputing Centres, inviting groups of primary and secondary school students, as well as individuals interested in the topic, to visit supercomputing centres all over Slovenia.
The event usually takes place on 18 October, when we celebrate Exa Day – the word “exa” means 1018 and is used in supercomputing to define the performance of a supercomputer. If a supercomputer can perform 1018 floating point operations per second (FLOPS), it means that it can perform more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second in one second. To put this into perspective, the average human being generally uses about 1 FLOPS for a simple computational operation such as addition. In the same amount of time, a supercomputer with exascale performance can perform 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPS. For the same performance, we would need about 100,000 laptops computing at the same time.
You are welcome to sign up for the SLING Newsletter and follow our monthly newsletter for more information on the exact date of the next Open Day.
