Limits in Computing Power,

In its few decades of existence, digital computer performance has increased staggeringly. In the 1930s, computers performed operations a few per second the largest contemporary machines are approaching 100 million per second. Most of this ratio of 8 orders of magnitude--has come from advances in electronic technology--relays to vacuum tubes to discrete solid state circuits to integrated microcircuits some has come from internal logical organization and system architecture. Ultimately, the principles of physics must limit computer speeds. This paper, drawing on a number of research results, attempts to estimate the performance yet possible to achieve but to put the subject in context, the authors briefly review some problems which demand super computers.